


An Angel, A Goddess and an Abomination Walk Into A Bunker

by Safiyabat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bunker Fic, Gen, sick!Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-22
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-15 19:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 55,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/853072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three weeks after the Great Fall, two figures from Sam's past arrive at the bunker to help him out.  He even knows one of them.  </p><p>(Inspired by the tumblr prompt about Sam's angel...)</p><p>NOTE: I own nothing.  Supernatural and the characters from the show are not my property.  I make no money from this or any other work of fan fiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sam leaned against a wall behind the others and tried to look nonchalant. “Not worried” was better than “can’t stand up independently” any day of the week. Covered a multitude of symptoms, really, and both were technically true. He wasn’t worried because he didn’t care. What was the worst that the intruders could do – kill him? And it wasn’t as though they could get indoors to do it, either. “One of them is an angel,” he warned, trying (and failing) to swallow the coughing fit that accompanied so many words.

  


Dean shot him a look even as he opened his own laptop. He was plenty competent with a computer now, thanks to Frank. He had Charlie and Kevin to help him out with anything he couldn’t handle on his own, and Cas to answer research questions. At least Sam wouldn’t be leaving him high and dry. “And how would you know that?” he demanded.  


“Because I can feel it,” he shot back. Of course Dean didn’t believe him. Why would he? Sam should have just kept his mouth shut. For all his brother’s complaining about wanting honesty he never seemed all that happy when he got it.  


The images from the surveillance cameras were up now. The wall was a good wall. It held Sam up admirably. Maybe he would let it guide him back to bed. It wasn’t as though he was doing much good out here. “Crap,” Dean objected. “I don’t know who the other chick is but that one is Artemis.”  


“Artemis,” Kevin repeated.  


“As in the goddess of Hunters,” Crowley confirmed. “Piss off any gods lately, Squirrel?”  


“Hey – all the pissing off was Sam,” the elder Winchester defended. “It’s a gift of his.”  


“It worked, didn’t it?” the dying hunter rasped. “She helped us in the end.”  


“Do you guys consort with gods on a regular basis?” the prophet wanted to know. It was easy to forget how little Kevin actually knew about them.  


“Not so much ‘consort,’” Dean had to admit. “We usually don’t leave them alive behind us. I’m starting to regret it now.”  


“The woman with her is Gilliel, my sister,” Cas identified. Sam avoided shooting his brother a look of triumph, because he was not five. It had nothing to do with not wanting the room to start spinning again, nothing at all. “She commanded a battalion in the garrison.” Sam couldn’t see the laptop with so many heads crowded around it so he didn’t bother. “She is a formidable enemy. The question is what would an angel be doing with a pagan god?”  


“Isn’t it obvious, angel?” Crowley pointed out. “She’s looking for the Winchesters and they cannot be tracked by angels. She enlisted the assistance of the best of the best. It would hardly be the first time that an angel resorted to outside assistance.” The reformed demon smirked.  


“But why?” Kevin’s eyebrows knit together. “What happened to the angels wasn’t Sam and Dean’s fault.”  


Cas turned pale and hung his head. Dean cleared his throat. “I helped, remember?” he pointed out. “And I’m sure they’ll blame us anyway. They know no one likes to screw over Heaven like we do.”  


“Plus I failed to close Hell,” Sam pointed out, and the fire inside him leaped at his words.  


“No. You stopped. That’s not the same thing as failing,” his brother growled.  


“I can still finish,” he pointed out.  


“No!” Castiel, Dean and Crowley barked in unison.  


“Why the hell not? The result will be the same either way. At least the angels might get off your backs and Abbadon won’t be able to come after Crowley.”  


“Shut up Sam,” Dean barked.  


The knock came at the door, cutting off the argument they’d had six times over the past three weeks. Dean and the others went to answer it. Sam’s knees decided they were done for the day and he sank to the floor. “Where is Sam Winchester?” Artemis demanded. After a two second pause, she added, “Why can’t I move forward?”  


“See, the guys who built this place, they weren’t too fond of non-humans,” Dean replied. Sam could only see his back, and no one really wants to spend all that much time looking at his brother’s ass, but the smirk at least was audible. And Dean said he was the one with the gift for pissing deities off. “It’s pretty thoroughly warded against all comers. Whatever it is you have in mind you are not getting my brother.”  


Crowley turned around and noticed the exorcist. “Sam!” he cried, and raced to help the younger Winchester to his feet. Sam could see them now. Artemis looked the same – less hostile maybe, but fundamentally the same. Gilliel actually reminded him a little bit of Cas, with dark hair and intense blue eyes. Unlike Cas, she had retained her Grace. The fire inside of him stretched out toward her, toward her Grace. She’d traded in the typical angelic suit for something more practical – jeans and a tee shirt, and boots. Her eyes widened when she saw him. “Sam Winchester,” she breathed, and damn him if she sounded less like a hostile angel on the warpath and more like a star-struck fangirl.  


Whatever. He’d been fooled before, with some pretty spectacular results. “That’s me.”  


“You’re in pain.”  


“Yeah.” He tried to give a light laugh but it turned into a cough. “It kind of comes with the job sometimes.”  


“Not like this,” she retorted. “I’m glad we found you before –“  


“Do. Not. Finish. That. Sentence,” Dean growled. He was growling a lot lately. Was he perhaps a were-bear? Sam resolved to test him with silver at the next opportunity, just to be sure. It wasn’t like they needed two denial-plagued hunters in the bunker, after all.  


“Well, I’m right here,” he told them.  


“Castiel,” Gilliel said then. “You seem… different.”  


“Metatron stole my Grace,” the former angel confessed with a hanging head. “He used it to complete the spell. I did not fall as Lucifer Fell; I am completely human now.”  


The grief on Gilliel’s face was not false. She stretched out her arms, but of course they could not cross the threshold. “Oh my brother,” she inhaled. “I am so sorry. At least you are among your other family – the Winchesters. They will help you.”  


“Look, sister,” Dean said, shifting like he had itching powder in his pants. “I’m glad you’re feeling all lovey with Cas – really – but why are you here exactly?”  


Gilliel blushed and tilted her head to the side in the patented Angelic Head Tilt. They all did it, every single one of them. Even Lucifer had done it. “I came to see Sam,” she explained. “As soon as I fell I knew. I wanted to come before the Great Fall but of course it was forbidden, but there is no more Heaven now. No more Heaven, no more orders, no more intelligence service, no more rules. My only goal was to see and speak with Sam Winchester.”  


She lacked the awkwardness of Castiel but none of his creepy intensity and now everyone was staring – not at her, because why would anyone want to stare at the creepy stalker angel, but at Sam. His mouth felt dry and there was really no way that he could keep standing if not for Crowley, and how weird was it that he needed to rely on fucking Crowley to stand under an angel’s gaze? No one seemed inclined to make a move. “Cas, do you trust her?”  


“I do,” he replied without hesitation. “She fought loyally on my side during the war in Heaven and assisted Dean when I was… unable to do so.”  


“Fine.” He pushed forward and staggered to the wall. “Dean, you’ve got that angel blade, right?”  


“Sam, no.”  


“And an ash stake?”  


“Sam, no.”  


Sam took the bandage off the Crowley bite. It hadn’t healed in the three weeks since the Great Fall, not even a little bit. Now he didn’t mind so much. He dipped his fingers into the open wound and drew the appropriate sigils onto the wall near the door. After a moment’s thought he remembered the right sigils and added the ones for Artemis as well. They glowed orange-red for a moment and then faded into the wall. The two supernatural beings walked into the bunker. “Thank you,” Artemis said, and caught him as he collapsed.


	2. Chapter 2

He woke up later in significantly less pain, with a lower fever. His tiny room was crowded with all of his bunkermates as well as the new angel and the goddess. Because nothing spells comfort like a closet filled with people unused to showering regularly. How the angel and the goddess could tolerate it was beyond Sam. “Are you more comfortable now, Sam?” Gilliel asked quietly.  


“Uh, yeah, “ he replied articulately. “Thanks. Sorry about that.”  


“I cannot heal your damage, Sam,” she informed him regretfully.  


“I know that,” he assured her. “It’s okay.”  


“I can make you more comfortable.”  


“You don’t need to do that,” he told her.  


“Sam, don’t be an idiot,” his brother ordered. “If she can keep you functioning, why shouldn’t you let her?”  


He sighed and glared at his brother. “Because she’s a person, Dean, not a Tylenol bottle with wings. She’s not a tool.”  


“Sam, I want to help you as much as I can for as much time as you have left,” the angel insisted. “It’s why I came to you in the first place. Well, part of the reason.” She reached out and took his hand. He couldn’t help but flinch from the contact, and she turned to him with such a soulful look that he almost felt bad for flinching. “May we speak privately?”  


“No way. No freakin’ way,” Dean objected. Sam sat up and swung his feet over the side of the bed while his brother continued his objections. “There is no way I’m letting some angel alone with my brother. That never goes well.”  


“Shut up, Dean. It will be fine.” Sam grabbed a flannel from his duffel – he felt naked without one – and stood up. He was still a little unsteady but he managed to stay upright. “Let’s go to the library.”  


“I’m working in the library,” Kevin objected. “You know, trying to solve the Heaven problem. Oh yeah, and the Hell problem you left unfinished.”  


“He would have died, Kevin Tran,” Artemis pointed out. Her voice was harsh and Sam would not have wanted to be Kevin with the look she gave to him.  


“You know what? My mother died. My girlfriend died. I lost my home, my future – everything. All those were acceptable sacrifices but he isn’t?” Kevin looked like he wanted to throw something but there was nothing in Sam’s room to throw.  


“You’re right,” Sam said softly, but Dean interrupted him.  


“No, he’s not right Sammy. Look, Kevin, I get that you’ve lost people. You think you’re the only one? We lost both our parents, freakin' Sammy never got to even know our mom. We lost Bobby. We’ve lost everyone we ever knew. You lost your girlfriend. Sammy, how many girlfriends have you lost? I mean that died.”  


He sighed again. He could feel a headache beginning just above and to the right of his nasal aperture. “Can we not do this?”  
“All of them, Kevin. Every last one of them. We’ve both been dead. And I mean dead. In Hell, damned, dead. More than once, now that I think of it. He’s lost his humanity.”  


“Dean, please just shut up. It’s not a contest, all right?” Sam passed his hand in front of his eyes as Kevin gaped. “I don’t… Gilliel, it’s fine. We’ll go outside, unless someone else has dibs on the air.” He pulled his shoes on and stalked outside. Who’d have thought he could still move that fast? Gilliel followed, along with Artemis at a polite distance.  


It wasn’t terribly difficult to find a tree to sit under outside. “Thanks for this,” he told her.  


“For?”  


He gestured. “This. I haven’t been well enough to leave the bunker since…”  


“Since the Great Fall,” the angel said gently.  


“Yeah. That. I have to admit that I’ve missed it. The fresh air. The sunshine. The quiet.”  


“You find the bunker confining?”  


“It’s a little… close in there. Especially now that we’re five instead of two, but even before that it was a little tight. Dean likes to keep a close eye on me.” He huffed. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you that.”  


“Because you need to tell someone. He cares for you very much.”  


‘Yeah.” He cared for Sammy, the wide-eyed thirteen year old who’d lit off fireworks in a field with him. The rest of it he was pretty sure his brother could easily live without. It wasn’t something that needed to be discussed though. It wasn’t as though it would help anything.  


“You never expected to return.”  


“No.” No one had asked him that. Had anyone needed to? He kind of felt like he’d made all the right noises.  


“Did you want to?”  


He sighed. “That’s kind of complicated, I guess. Not really. Not by the end. Not even really by the start. I mean, maybe it would have been possible for me to get out of hunting some other way, but let’s face it, something would have dragged me back in somehow. I’m a poison to everything I touch and Dean will be better off – happier, even – when I’m gone. It would have been better if it had meant something, if I could have accomplished something. But whatever.” He waved a hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be bitching about my own crap. You had something you needed to discuss. I’m not in shape to do much about much but I’ll do what I can to help you.”  


She smiled and shook her head. “You are exactly what I imagined you would be,” she said. “Why did you flinch away from me before?”  


He sighed. “It’s complicated.”  


“Please. I want to help.”  


“It’s not the kind of thing someone can help, I don’t think. It’s just… you know. Me. How I am now.”  


“Physical contact reminds you of your time in Hell.”  


He nodded. He would not have expected an angel to understand or to care, but her eyes were wide and sympathetic without pity. “It’s not so bad if I’m expecting it, or if I initiate it.”  


“It is perhaps worse if it is an angel?”  


He shrugged. “It’s not like I have contact with a lot of angels.” He met her eyes. “Can we please not talk about this?”  


“I am sorry. I want to help.”  


“I don’t think there is help. Not anymore.”  


“You could talk to Dean.”  


He laughed. “Yeah. No. He’ll just get all pissed that I didn’t talk about it before, and pissed at me about the whole thing.”  


“At least he might stop giving you attack hugs.”  


He stopped and this time he did laugh, a real laugh this time. It was only a small laugh but it was probably the first time he’d really laughed since… what, their first encounter with the Trickster, when they’d had the slow-dancing aliens? “Attack hugs. Maybe. He has gotten awfully huggy lately.” He didn’t know what was up with that either, he’d ask but some depths were better left unplumbed. Maybe Benny had been a hugger. Huggy vampires, now he’d seen it all. At least he didn't sparkle.  


She met his eyes. “Sam,” she said then, “I’ve come all this way to ask you to forgive me.”  


Well, that was unexpected. He blinked. “Uh… okay? I’m sorry, I’m pretty sure we’ve never met –“  


“No. We haven’t. I first heard your voice some twenty-eight years ago. Your brother had fallen somehow and scraped his knees pretty badly. You said your first prayer. You said, ‘Please, God, help my brother’s knees feel better.’ Of course, you know now that our Father had stopped listening to prayers long ago, but we heard prayers and I heard yours.  


“I heard yours, and of course your family had been watched for millennia. I wanted to go to you, but you were already marked as Azazel’s child.”  


“An abomination,” Sam supplied. If there was a little bitterness there he hoped Gilliel understood its direction.  


She shrugged. “That was how Heaven saw you. I… I want you to understand that I never thought of you that way, Sam. I had to pretend, I had to fall in line. You don’t know what Heaven’s intelligence service is capable of.”  


“Castiel has given us some idea.”  


“Perhaps you do then. At any rate, I did help Dean’s knees heal. An infection was starting to set in and your father would never have taken him to a doctor. Over the years, I heard your prayers. All of them. You prayed every night. Most of the time your prayers were thankful prayers. ‘Thank you for Dean.’ ‘Thank you for Uncle Bobby.’ Thank you for this teacher, for that teacher, for the library. When you found out about what your father truly did you sometimes asked for his safety. More often than not you asked for your brother’s safety.  


“You never asked for your own. I watched you though. If it was possible for me to help you without attracting the notice of Heaven I tried to do so. This did not happen often. Sometimes you would find a fifty-dollar bill in the street and you and Dean would be able to eat while your father stayed gone longer than intended. Sometimes a bullet would miss just slightly.  


“Then you went to Stanford. You still prayed, and you prayed for Dean. You said, ‘I know he’s better off without me, but please just let him be safe. Let him be happy, let him be safe.’ Of course, you had your own problems there, but you never considered asking to be kept safe from them. You asked for your friends’ safety. ‘Please, keep Jess safe from this thing.’ ‘Please, help Brady from whatever he’s going through. Help him get clean.’  


“You started hunting again when Dean came for you. I wanted to comfort you in this, I cannot describe how much I wanted to come to you and succor you and help you to sleep. This was when your premonitions started and if ever you needed comfort it was then, but it was forbidden. You were in such turmoil as you met your siblings – Azazel’s other human children, I mean. Some of them were good, and some of them were not, and some of them turned. It was so hard for you, so terrifying. And then you were murdered. You do not remember, but you came to Heaven. I was not even permitted to greet you, because we knew that you would be going back. It was necessary, you see. For the Apocalypse.  


“I knew by then, of course, that the goal was never to prevent the Apocalypse. I saw the misery that you underwent. You tried so hard to stop it; you put yourself through so much. You worked so hard to keep him out of Hell and you could do nothing. After he went to Hell of course was even worse, and you tried even harder. You sacrificed so much. You sacrificed your very humanity and your brother would never understand. He never will. Still you prayed. ‘Save my brother.’ ‘Help my brother.’ ‘When this is over, help him to understand.’ ‘When it’s done, let him understand why I did what I did and let him remember me well.’ Then, as with this last time, you did not expect to come out alive.’”  


It was only with difficulty that Sam kept himself from an emotional outburst. “Yeah.”  


“And then you separated. Still you prayed. For Dean. For Castiel, for Bobby, for Ellen and for Jo and for Lindsey. As of the Fall she was still alive, by the way. She is engaged.”  


Sam snorted. “Miracles never cease,” he said. He’d been tempted, of course. In those days it hadn’t been difficult to tempt him. An intelligent and reasonably attractive female of whatever species – apparently he wasn’t picky – and he’d be off and running. Of course, with Lucifer running around in his head he’d figured maybe she didn’t need so much of that in her life, and that was probably why she’d survived the End Times that Weren’t. So maybe Lucifer had been good for something after all.  


“I moved her to Arizona after the incident with the hunters, after you left,” she said. “We had a little talk about not ever mentioning you again. You prayed and you prayed, and I’m sure it seemed to you as though no one was listening but Sam, I listened. I could do very little but I listened. That blast that Jo and Ellen set off? It killed Ellen very quickly, and without pain. It also had a much larger radius than it would have otherwise.  


“When you… when you went into the Cage you still prayed. Even then you didn’t pray for yourself. ‘Please let Bobby be safe,’ you said. ‘Please let Dean be safe. Please help him settle down with Lisa and Ben. Please let Dean be happy and safe. It was like a mantra, over and over in my ears. For the most part your soulless self was walking the earth by that point, so I was able to get involved. I was able to steer cases toward him that kept him near enough to Dean to keep the bad things away but far enough that he wouldn’t notice them.  


“Of course, this was during the Second Heavenly War, and my time was divided. I fought for Castiel. I checked in on you whenever I could. Will it offend you…” She looked away, then back up at him. “I felt it was an injustice that you were forced to live after your soul was reattached, Sam. Is that wrong to say?”  


He grinned a little. “Not at all.” It felt good to hear it come from someone else. “Hell, it’s not like I can say it. They already took all the sharp objects away; next it will be the bed sheets. But they knew what they consequences would be.”  


“You have… handled the situation well.”  


He snorted. “Is that what you call it?”  


“You’re functioning. You’ve lost none of your humanity, none of your compassion.” She sighed. He steeled himself and managed not to flinch as she brushed the hair from his face. “You are unused to praise.”  


“Ruby used to praise me all the time. Azazel too.”  


“Maybe they did. Even a demon can be right some of the time.” She smiled, and then she sighed again. “Please forgive me, Sam.”  


“I still don’t get it. What for?”  


“For failing you. For not helping you. For not standing up to Heaven when I should have. For not having eased your way. For not doing more.”  


He wanted to laugh, because the situation was so absurd. He destroyed literally everything he touched and here was this angel begging for his forgiveness, like he wasn’t some kind of walking talking toxin. He would have laughed if she didn’t have actual tears coming from her eyes. “Gilliel,” he said instead, in as soft a tone as he could, “you’ve honestly done nothing to forgive. I… no one could expect you to go up against Heaven. I mean, free will is a really new thing for angels in the first place, right?” He reached out and touched her face. The tears stopped and she looked so fucking hopeful all he wanted to do was make her happy. “If you feel that you need my forgiveness for something, of course you’ve got it. There’s nothing that I blame you for, there’s nothing that I’m going to hold a grudge for. Okay?”  


“Will you let me help you now, since I could not help you then?”  


“Gilliel, there isn’t a whole lot of help for me –“  


“Please, Sam.”  


He sighed. “Okay. But if you’re feeling overworked or put upon or used in any way, you tell me, okay? You’re a person, not a hammer.” He was rewarded by a brilliant smile, one he couldn’t help but respond to. Maybe he wasn’t good for much anymore but he’d made one person happy for a little while.


	3. Chapter 3

Sam hung out under the tree for a while by himself. It was nice to be alone for a while. Who’d have thought that would be what he wanted most? Strange that being alone made him seem less lonely. (Wasn’t that a line in a song somewhere?) He supposed it was a contrast thing. The bonds between the others in the bunker – well, they were getting stronger, weren’t they? That was a good thing. They’d need each other going forward, and it was right and proper that they clicked and rubbed the edges off each other so that the fit was better and all that crap. Sam wasn’t part of that, wouldn’t ever be a part of that, couldn’t be a part of that even if he wanted to and everyone knew it. They weren’t mean about it or anything, but it was just… awkward. Out here he didn’t feel so very out of place. He could just lean against his tree – this tree, he reminded himself sternly, not his, never his – and appreciate the warm air and the sunshine.   
It didn’t take him long to doze off. Of course a doze for him turned into a fully-fledged nap pretty quickly, complete with dreams and everything. He dreamed all the time lately. Well, that was nothing new. He’d always dreamed, and it had never been good. He’d heard classmates and friends and lovers and whatever say “I was having the most incredible dream” and he’d never once been able to relate. Before the Trials he’d dreamed about the past. He’d dreamed about the past a lot. Once the Trials started of course things changed. Now he mostly dreamed about the future. Not like he’d dreamed about the future when he’d been a young man, though – not other people’s futures. Now he dreamed about his own future. Specifically he dreamed about Hell.   
When he’d gone into Hell to retrieve Bobby’s soul the Trials were already doing their damage to his body, but once he’d stepped into Purgatory he’d felt almost whole again. In Hell his pain had dissipated entirely. The first time he’d been in Hell he’d been a prisoner, tortured for eons and unable to see or interact beyond the confines of a cage in the deepest part of the Pit. (He’d learned later that others could see in, because you know, what was happening to him inside wasn’t bad enough he needed the humiliation of Crowley watching.) This time he stepped into the infernal realm as though for the first time with no map, no guide, a goal and a strict deadline and he had no problem. He had not gotten lost. It wasn’t a cakewalk by any stretch of the imagination. There had been demons and he’d fought them, but he had fought them and he’d won. (The stirring of his own infernal abilities had driven him near to distraction, but he’d fought them off and stuck to the knife and his own brute strength.) None of the cages were even locked for him. They opened at his touch. He hadn’t even come close to getting lost.  
There was a feeling he’d sought his entire life. Living in seedy motels and by-the-week rentals, he’d never belonged anywhere. He’d never had a sense of community, a sense of place. His unique blood made him out of place in his family; his family made him out of place everywhere else. He faked it well, but he’d never found anyplace that was really his. No place he belonged, until that moment.  
Sam belonged in Hell.   
It was a horrible thing to know about yourself, and an especially horrible thing to know about yourself when you were looking at your last few weeks on Earth.   
He saw Abbadon as she roamed the halls of Hell. If Sam’s dream were to be believed – and of course he trusted the produce of a dying brain and a fever – not everyone had been on board with Crowley’s cleaner, more efficient Hell. Plenty of people had longed for the good old days, and why had Meg not managed to rally those troops to her cause? Probably because she was not a Knight of Hell, just a plain old Lucifer loyalist. (Or because she was Azazel’s child. Like him. What a warped and twisted family he had, and he couldn’t even think those thoughts in the waking world lest Dean lose his little mind. Hey, “Sammy Has Two Daddies.” Sounds like a great kids’ book.) Others fought her – those who’d prospered under Crowley, or those who just didn’t want a return to the days of the Apocalypse. Those who weren’t so keen on their Lord walking the Earth again.   
Idiots, he thought to himself. Did they seriously not learn the last time? He hates them even more than he hates us.   
He woke when Dean came for him. The sun was almost setting. “Hey, Rip Van Winkle,” his brother greeted. He very carefully didn’t touch Sam when he came to wake him which was a surprise. Gilliel had probably spoken to him. That should probably have annoyed the younger Winchester but at this point what pride did he really have left? “It’s time to come back inside. ‘Skeeters are coming out.”   
He didn’t want to come back inside, not even a little bit. “Mosquitoes don’t bite me, Dean,” he pointed out. “It’s the blood.” They’d never bitten him, not even as a little child. He wondered what would happen if one did. Demonic mosquitoes? Was the world ready for a mosquito hopped up on demon blood and the lingering remnants of Lucifer’s twisted Grace? And if it then bit someone else, would his own curse be transmitted to the victim? Would it be like Spider-Man? He laughed a little.   
“Well, it’s dinner time anyway. Come on. Cas made – well, Cas cooked. It’s not bad.”  
Like Sam would be able to tell if it was good or bad. Dean wouldn’t leave him alone unless he came inside, though. He used the tree to brace himself and pushed himself up. “Fine.” He staggered a little and Dean caught him reflexively. Michael’s hands, digging into his ribs. He winced. “Let’s go.”  
Dean insisted on “helping” him back inside. “I guess your angel girlfriend really took a lot out of you, huh?’ he teased.   
“What?” Sam blinked.  
“Gilliel. Or whatever her name is. Your angelic girlfriend. Way to go there, Sammy-boy. She’s pretty hot.”  
He jerked his arm away from Dean. “Not my girlfriend, Dean.” He felt a wave of dizziness come over him but kept his footing.   
“You could probably fix that if you played your cards right.”  
“Dean, no.”  
“Aw, come on, Sammy. You deserve some –“  
“Dean, I can’t even stand up. No. Just… no. So stop talking about it, stop thinking about it. Just stop.”   
“She could probably help you with that –“  
“For God’s sake Dean just shut up!” he yelled, followed by a coughing fit so bad that he doubled over. The spasm took a good five minutes to pass and left him reeling. Dean hovered protectively behind him, a hand on his back. So much for Gilliel getting through to him.   
“We’re gonna find a way to get you better, Sammy,” Dean insisted, and if that wasn’t the dumbest thing Sam had ever heard it had to be in the top three. There wasn’t a cure for this. “We’re gonna find a cure.” Seriously, his brother had just outed himself as Anderson.   
“Sure, Dean.” If it made Dean feel better. He straightened himself slowly and let his brother help him back into the bunker.   
Everyone else was already waiting at the table, to include the goddess and the angel. “Sorry to keep everyone waiting,” Dean said as he guided Sam to an empty seat. Fortunately the empty seat was at the end of the table, between Crowley and Castiel, instead of near Gilliel. After Dean’s lewd commentary Sam didn’t feel like he could look the angel in the eye.   
Cas had made pho. Once upon a time Sam had kind of liked pho. That had been five thousand something years ago, when he’d been at Stanford. Or nine years ago, you know, depending. If the responses of the other diners were any indication the former angel had done an excellent job with the recipe. Even Kevin approved and he was really the best judge of them all, even though his mom’s was best. Sam tried a couple of spoonfuls of the stuff but it all kind of tasted like ash and rotted meat to him. Kind of like everything else. He made sure to poke at it with his spoon, though. This was an important tactic in avoiding irritating questions and Masculine Maternal Hovering. If they saw you poking with your spoon they thought you were eating. It was that simple. He’d learned that one when he’d been about three.   
He wondered what kids with real mothers did.   
Kevin had spent the day going over the Demon Tablet. He’d previously focused on the Trials exclusively for obvious reasons. Now he wanted to get everything down and right. Maybe he could find a way to shut down Hell without killing anyone. Either way, he wanted to make sure that the other knowledge included in the tablet (the demon bombs, et cetera) was codified in a way that was accessible to future scholars. He also wanted to make sure that the information that Sam and Dean had gained through the Trials (curing a demon, killing a hellhound, freeing a soul from Hell) was properly written down and accessible as well.   
“I’m not sure that the information about freeing a soul from Hell would be at all useful to future generations, Kevin,” Gilliel objected mildly. “There isn’t any harm to including it, but I’m fairly certain that only Sam could have actually succeeded at that trial.”   
“Why?” the prophet wanted to know. “Why him and not some other hunter? I mean, yeah, he’s freakishly tall, but what’s that got to do with anything?”  
Crowley sighed and buried his head in his hands. “He doesn’t know?”  
“Doesn’t know what?” Kevin clearly didn’t like being left in the dark.  
“I’m not human, Kevin,” Sam supplied quickly. Why beat around the bush?   
“Sam,” Dean warned.  
“Why sugarcoat it, Dean? It’s the truth.”  
Cas cleared his throat. “Your soul is human,” he observed. “Your body… is more human than not.”   
“How the hell is Sam not human when Dean is?” The youngest member of their party scowled, and even through the intense discomfort Sam felt at the topic of discussion he couldn’t help but enjoy not being the youngest anymore. “Same mother. Same father.”  
“It’s kind of a long story,” he said. “A demon… did something… when I was a baby. Fed me demon blood. It changed me, made me not fully human. Then I became addicted during the run-up to the Apocalypse and that changed me more.”   
“Why the hell would a demon bleed into a baby’s mouth?” Kevin asked after a few moments.   
“He had plans for Sam,” Crowley explained. “Sam’s being too modest. He’s big news downstairs. Azazel intended for Sam to succeed him as King of Hell.”   
“King of Hell.”  
“That’s right. He’d have done a right good job of it too. I’d have voted for him.”  
“You don’t vote for a king, Crowley,” the non-king told the deposed king.  
“Sam,” Kevin repeated.   
Sam got up. “I’d really rather not talk about this,” he told them. “I get that you’re curious, Kevin. And you deserve to know who you’ve been locked up with for all these months and everything. I just… can’t. I’ll be in the library.” Fortunately he had just enough strength to get out to the library, and while the acoustics in this place were way too good to completely isolate the unpleasant conversation in the other room his iPod was in his pocket and he could drown it out.   
It wasn’t like he was going to eat much anyway.  
He grabbed a book from a random stack. He knew that Cas and Dean had been pulling books for him to look at anyway; he just assumed this was one of them. Kevin’s stuff was on his own table; Sam knew better than to mess with it. The one on the top was in … he looked for a moment. At first he thought Hebrew but then he reconsidered. Aramaic. Interesting. Cas was probably a better choice to deal with things like Aramaic, or maybe Gilliel if she were open to such things, but what the hell. Maybe the intellectual exercise would help get his mind off the discussion in the other room (assuming that he could focus that long.)   
Wasn’t that a fun legacy of his Cage time? He’d always been good with languages, that was no secret. But after he’d gotten out of the Cage – after Dean and Death had conspired to forcibly reunite his soul with his body – he’d found himself with a whole new set of more-or-less dead languages at his disposal. Was it the legacy of the Cage or of sharing a meat suit with Lucifer? He’d had to give up his body and mind to the Devil, but the Devil had shared his mind with Sam as well and extrication had been a challenge. He’d only ever known of two archangelic vessels that had been left empty. His father had been “borrowed” but that had been a brief contact, and no one could really accuse John Winchester of being particularly well adjusted. Then there had been the guy Raphael had used, who was a drooling wreck when Raphael was not in active residence. Nick – well, containing Lucifer even for a few months had burned him from the inside out. There hadn’t even been much of a body left when the angel had moved into Sam –  
His hand trembled. It wasn’t from fever. He focused on the Aramaic and tried not to think about why he could read it.   
The scroll unfortunately was unlikely to be a complete bust. Some dude sitting out in the Syrian wilderness two thousand years ago thought he talked to angels, but he also thought that eating the berries that grew up against the north wall of his donkey-dung hut was just a fabulous idea and somehow Sam just found him to lack credibility as a witness. He had a job to do though. If nothing else it would save Kevin and Cas the trouble of having to translate this crap later on. He dutifully began typing into his laptop, losing himself in the work as he’d intended.   
A tumbler filled with ice appeared before him. He lifted bleary eyes. After a moment they focused, not that it should have taken long to figure out who was there. It wasn’t as though there were more than two women in the bunker. Artemis sat in the chair nearest to his left side. She had a tumbler of her own. “You’ve been at this for four hours,” she said. “And you’ve been coughing for three hours straight.”   
No wonder his throat felt like he’d been gargling with rock salt. “Oh.”  
“Your brother says it’s time to stop and I have to say that I concur.” She held up an unopened bottle, labeled in Greek. The hunter could just make out the word “ouzo.” At his raised eyebrow she shrugged. “What? Gilliel has her ways of helping and I have mine. No funny business, no weird potions. Plain old ouzo. The good stuff of course. I am a god.” She opened the bottle and poured some into each cup. The clear liquid became milky immediately.   
“Did Dean find rooms for you and Gilliel?” he asked. The licorice scent was overpowering, but his throat did feel soothed by the scent.   
“It’s not like we sleep, Sam. But your cured demon butler did. Crowley, I think his name was.”  
He couldn’t help it. He laughed, which set off another coughing fit. “Demon butler. Right.”   
She grinned. “What? It’s what he is.”  
“I guess… that’s not really what I had in mind.” He shook his head.   
“What is it that you had in mind then?”  
“It was part of the Trials. Cure a demon. He wouldn’t let any of them up to the surface, so we caught him. He and I never had what you would call a friendly relationship before that.” Butler. Who would have thought a Winchester would even have a home, much less a butler?   
“Well he seems a little overfond of you now.”  
“It’s kind of creepy, really,” he admitted. “But whatever. He feels guilty about… well, everything really. He wants to make up for everything that he’s done and I guess that he sees this as part of that.”  
“I think he just wants to help you, Sam.”  
“There isn’t a lot of help for me.” He leaned back a little.   
“No. There isn’t.” She sighed. “Your body isn’t fully human, which is why you’ve lasted as long as you have. But you are mortal, and a mortal body was not meant to contain enough power to shut down an entire plane of existence. It’s just not.”  
“I know.” He shrugged and took another drink. “I’m okay with it, Artemis. Really.”   
“I can see that. It’s kind of disturbing, really.” She drank from her tumbler. “Can I ask you something?”  
“You’re a god, Artemis. You can do what you want.”  
She laughed a little then. “Why did you help Prometheus?”  
He frowned. “Why wouldn’t we? We help people. It’s our job.”  
“No. You hunt monsters. Gods. People like me. Once you figured out that he wasn’t human you should have let him go.”  
“No,” he objected, leaning forward. “I mean, maybe. When I didn’t have a soul sure, that was probably more of my mindset. Even then, though, I’d have probably liked the challenge. Hell, I did like the challenge. He wasn’t hurting anyone. He was just kind of wandering around, dying a lot, you know? He didn’t deserve that. And then when we figured out who he was –“  
“When you figured out who he was,” the deity interrupted with a little smile.  
He frowned. “I guess. I try not to think about it that way.”  
“It’s true though.”  
“It… it’s never led to good things, you know?” He couldn’t afford to let himself remember some of the things he’d said, not when he’d been under the influence of the ghost at the haunted asylum, not under the siren’s control. He couldn’t even let himself think those thoughts. “Anyway, when we figured out who he was, I mean, how could we not help him? He saved humanity and he got shafted for it. He deserved some help.”   
“So it was personal for you?” She still had that little smile of hers.   
“What? No. No no no. Those two situations were nothing alike. Nothing at all. I knew what I was getting into. I knew exactly what to expect.”  
“Both times?”  
“Yes.”   
“Hm.” They both took another drink. He’d liked Prometheus. He wished he’d had more of a chance to get to know him. “I’ll buy helping him. I’ll buy helping him even after you found out he was a god. Risking your life to help him though?”  
He laughed. “Artemis, that’s kind of what we do.”  
“Taunting angry gods?”  
“It’s not like I had any weapons on hand that were going to work. Besides, I was pretty sure it was going to work.” He felt a corner of his mouth move up. Even now, he still liked being right. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said then, remembering himself. “I had to be a bit of an ass there and I apologize.”  
She sighed. “I know you had to. You needed to get through to me. You were desperate to save him and his son. It’s not your fault. I blame that sow. You would have succeeded if she hadn’t freed my father.”   
“She’s a mother. She was desperate to save her son.”   
“I wouldn’t know how that feels.”   
“Me neither. But I can guess.”  
“You don’t want children?”  
He raised an eyebrow. “It’s kind of moot, isn’t it?”   
She shrugged. “Pretend for a minute that you’re healthy.”  
He laughed. “I’ve never been healthy, Artemis. I’ve never been human. I’m just about the last person in the world who should even consider having children. I’m Lucifer’s vessel. That’s genetic. If I don’t pass that on I can’t contribute to that whole Apocalypse happening again. I shouldn’t be passing this whole demon blood thing on either – I mean, it’s part of me. It would always have been part of me, no matter what I did.”  
She put her glass down and refilled it, refreshing his at the same time. “You ever think about going pagan, Sam? We’re a lot less hung up about that sort of thing than your usurping God and his religion.”   
He drank the drink. “You’re kidding, right?”  
“No, seriously.”  
“It’s a little late in the day to be changing religions, even if I were the religious type. Which I’m not. I mean, sure, I believe in God. I believe in the Devil because I’ve met him. I spent five thousand years locked in a cage with him. I believe in you. I’m sitting here having a drink with you.” She laughed, and he felt better. He leaned back a little. “I’m part of the whole ‘usurping’ religion, you know? I don’t want to be, but there I am.”  
“You don’t have to be, Sam. Come on. Free will, right?”   
Could a goddess get drunk? He drank some more of the ouzo. “Appealing. Like I said, though, it’s kind of late in the day. Besides, it always finds me in the end. I tried to walk away from all of this crap a few times and it still found me.”  
“I suppose that it did. And yeah, maybe it is kind of late in the day.” She leaned back herself, eyes on him. “What is it that you want, Sam?”  
“Me? Nothing.”   
“Come on, there has to be something.”  
“Not really. Not realistically. I used to want a normal life. Not normal. Safe.” He remembered giving that line to Dean once, back in California about a zillion years ago. “I had normal for a little while, but I know it can’t last. And now of course it’s not even possible. There’s no time, even if I could get away.” He thought about it. “I’d like for Dean to be safe. And happy. The rest of them, too. Cas. Kevin. Hell, even Crowley.”  
She waved a hand. “What about you?”  
“I’m not even going to be here in a few weeks. You want to know what I want? I want to stop the waiting. Get it over with.” He drained his glass.   
“Really,” she responded.  
“Really.” He stood up slowly, so as not to fall on his shaky semi-useless legs. “Sorry to drink and dash, but I’m pretty beat. I should go to bed. Thanks for the ouzo.”   
She smiled at him, and he headed back off to the privacy of his room.


	4. Chapter 4

When Sam went to bed he’d felt awful. His chest had felt like his corsets were too tight, the entire bunker had seemed to be on an extra spin cycle and only the wall had kept him upright. He hadn’t even managed to change into pajamas before passing out, just fallen face-first onto the mattress. He’d been alone of course, although he was reasonably certain that he didn’t stay that way. When he woke up his flannel shirt had been removed and he’d been flipped over, which was a lot more comfortable than sleeping with one’s face in a pillow when breathing was an issue. He was breathing more easily too, and managed to haul himself into a sitting position. 

Who knew that ouzo could calm coughing fits? 

He got up and found his shower supplies. He needed to wash up, and while he hated the idea of using an angel as a celestial analgesic he wasn’t going to waste it when she sneaked into his room and eased his pain while he wasn’t looking. (To be honest, he hated the idea of angels sneaking into his room at all. He wasn’t going to think about that, though.) He showered as quickly as he could, grateful that no one else seemed to be in there at the moment. The showers had not been constructed for privacy. They reminded him of the showers at the Green River Correctional Facility. At least he was getting clean, he reminded himself. As clean as he got, anyway. Even an autoclave couldn’t clean the stains in him, but soap and water and decent shampoo could do something about the stink.

Of course, it was after two now. That explained why no one else was in the shower. His lazy ass had been in bed for fourteen hours straight. Fat lot of good he was doing. He got some clothes on and shuffled into the kitchen.

“Good morning, Sam,” Crowley greeted him with mild cheer. “Care for some coffee?” 

He kept a straight face, but only barely. All he could think of was Artemis calling the former king of Hell his demon butler. “Uh, sure, if there’s any left.”

“It’s not like it’s a challenge to make, Sam.” He pushed a button on the coffee pot. “The others are all in the war room. How are you feeling today? Well rested?”

“I suppose. How about yourself?” Sure, Crowley was cured. Sure, he was human now for a given value of human. As human as Sam was at any rate, probably more. Either way, the hunter just couldn’t help being a little creeped out by having his former enemy around all the time. Having Crowley be so… nice. And helpful. A demon butler.

“I’m well, Sam. Thank you. I think Kevin might have designs on portions of my skin, but it honestly seems no more than reasonable and he does seem to like my vegan sausage and potatoes for breakfast. There’s some left over in the fridge, I can heat it up for you.”

Sam’s stomach grumbled and lurched at the same time. He didn’t think it was possible to get such strong and opposite reactions; if he had time he’d be sure to consult a physiologist or some such person on the subject. “No thanks. I don’t think I can handle much more than coffee right now.”

“Suit yourself mate. As soon as the prophet figures out it’s in there he’ll devour it like locusts in Egypt. Maybe some toast?”

“I’m not… just can’t. I know you’re a good cook, Crowley, and I appreciate you trying. I just can’t.” He gave a weak smile and for the love of all that was holy, why was this part of his punishment? The Cage had been bad. The pain he had now was bad. Being insane had been bad. He’d deserved every goddamn minute of everything he’d endured. But being responsible for the emotional well being of the demon that had done so much to so many? Why was that on him? “Seriously, Crowley, thanks.” Maybe Artemis had been right. Maybe he should go pagan. If he did, could he possibly be excused from trying to make Crowley a happy little ex-demon? 

“It’s okay, Sam. “ 

“I said no and that’s final!” Dean bellowed from the war room. “Are you insane? He can’t even stand on his own!”

“For fuck’s sake,” Sam muttered into his mug.

“Yeah. I’m thinking I’ll make a nice tasty stew,” the former demon confided. “They’ve been at it for an hour already.”

“What’s the deal now?”

“Why not go find out for yourself? I’ll bring your coffee in when it’s ready.”

“Because I’m afraid the shouting will make my head split open,” he admitted.

“Gives you a great reason to shut it down, Sam,” Crowley pointed out. “Come on, you’re smarter than that. I’ve seen you manipulate coroners, sheriffs, lawyers, politicians. I’ve seen you manipulate gods. You can certainly use your miraculous puppy-dog eyes on that lot in there to get them to turn down the volume.”

He sighed. He didn’t like to think of himself as manipulative, but it was true. He did what he had to do. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.”

His companion gave him what was probably meant as an encouraging smile. “Have at ‘em.”

Sam sighed and shuffled into the War Room. Five pairs of eyes looked up at him. Gilliel and Dean rose immediately. “Well, if it isn’t Sleeping Beauty,” Dean greeted, taking one arm and trying to guide Sam to a seat between him and Cas.

“Did you get some breakfast?” “Sam, are you feeling better this morning?” Gilliel wanted to know. She took Sam’s other arm and tried to guide him to a seat on the opposite side of the map table, between herself and Artemis. The goddess’ eyes were locked on Dean’s and they were not the semi-friendly eyes of last night. “I tried to help when your nightmares began –“

Kevin sat at the end of the table. His expression hovered somewhere between shell shocked and entertained. “Sam,” he greeted. “Were you able to make any sense out of that Aramaic text you were working on last night?”

“I was able to translate it,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of sense to be made. Seems that the guy was eating a lot of the berries that were growing in the shade of his house. He wasn’t seeing angels. He was tripping balls. Think less ‘Revelations’ and more ‘Fear and Loathing in Ancient Syria.’ I’ll make sure it gets uploaded to the archive today.” He gently extricated himself from both of his “saviors” and sat at the other end of the table. No way he was feeding into whatever idiotic fight was brewing between his brother and their divine houseguests. No way. People kept telling him he was supposed to be the smart one and he was proving it right now, fever or no fever. “I’m feeling up to working on another text today, probably, thanks to Gilliel. What about you and Cas, Kevin. Find anything?”

“I learned that some ancient Mesopotamian demons can be trapped under bowls,” Castiel informed solemnly.

“Under bowls,” Dean repeated. “Well that’s helpful.”

“Sam asked if I had learned anything. He didn’t specify that it be helpful.”

Sam blinked. Then he couldn’t help it. He laughed. Okay, he didn’t really laugh-laugh, but he snickered. That was about as close as he’d come in years, but it was an honest snicker. “You just made a joke.” The other humans’ incomprehension bobbed like icebergs on the seas of their faces. “Good one, Cas.” The fallen angel gave a small smile, one only meant for Sam and that actually felt good. “All right. Well, we keep plugging away, I guess. It’s not like we’ve got any other options, right?”

“Well, that’s not entirely true, Sam,” Artemis objected as Crowley came into the room with coffee. Had he mojoed the coffee pot? There was no possible way for that thing to have made the coffee that fast otherwise. It was unnatural. “Gilliel and I would like for you to come and meet some people with us.”

“But you’re not going,” Dean added, and his voice rose a good ten decibels. Sam wondered if he even knew. The elder brother glared daggers at the goddess. “You can’t even stand up for five minutes together, there’s no way you’re leaving the bunker until we can get you well.”

Good Lord, Sam wanted to get out of the bunker like he wanted oxygen. More than he wanted oxygen technically. Meeting more people wasn’t exactly high on his list of fun ways to pass the time though. “Where are these people?” he asked instead of voicing those reservations.

“California,” she replied. 

Of course they were. “Look, Artemis, I’d love to get out and stretch my legs a bit,” he admitted, “but I don’t think I’m really up for a long distance car ride, you know?”

Gilliel frowned. “Sam, there is no reason to subject you to such discomfort. Either Artemis or I would be perfectly capable of transporting you anywhere you wanted to go.”

“Except he doesn’t want to go anywhere,” Dean insisted.

“Sam understands the importance of finding the solution to the problems of the gates of Heaven and Hell,” Castiel added seriously. “He is far too responsible to believe that a… vacation is a good idea right now.”

“Because there’s so much time left for vacations,” Crowley snapped. “Can no one see that?”

“You just shut your cake hole, Crowley,” his brother yelled, “or we’ll find out just how thoroughly you were cured.”

“Besides, didn’t he get enough of a vacation last year?” Kevin wanted to know.

“Does he look well rested to you?” the former demon yelled.

“He needs peace and quiet,” Gilliel insisted. “Not this constant pressure and conflict.”

“You’ve known my brother for less than twenty-four hours, sister,” Dean told her. “What gives you the right to say anything about what my brother needs?”

“Dean has been caring for him for thirty years,” Cas added, and Sam pushed his chair back very slowly and quietly. “I think that he has a better grasp of his brother’s very human needs than an angel.”

“Which is why he didn’t notice that his brother was on a suicide mission until the very end,” Crowley snorted. “Oh come on, Squirrel. Even I picked up on that one months ago.”

“Screw you, Crowley,” Dean hollered. Sam slowly stood up and backed away. He managed to keep his footing well enough as he walked. He didn’t even spill any of the mojoed coffee. “You know nothing about what’s been going on around here. “

I’ve been studying the pair of you for years, boy,” the deposed king insisted. “Do you really think there’s much that I don’t know?”

Sam was already at the door by now. Artemis wasn’t far behind him. She walked back toward the little grove of trees with him, although she was careful not to touch him. “Dean can be a little overprotective,” he said by way of apology. “He means well.” 

“I’m sure he does,” she shrugged. “You planning to let him do your thinking for you here?&rdquo

;

“Who is it you want me to meet?”

“A couple of my brothers.” She gave him a little half smile. “They liked Prometheus too. They want to meet you.”

“Why couldn’t we bring Dean?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“He gets really, really twitchy when I go off on my own. He thinks I need a chaperone to use the restroom at diners.”

“Do you?”

He shrugged. “I’ve made some bad decisions in the past. He obviously thinks I’ll make them again.”

“Will you?”

“I don’t think I will. Of course, I didn’t think I was making bad decisions then, you know? I thought I was doing what I had to do under the circumstances, and yeah sometimes they sucked.” He sat down. “Doesn’t mean it was always the right thing to do.”

“What is it that you want to do here, Sam?” she asked him. 

“It doesn’t really matter, does it? I can’t really just leave Dean and Cas and Kevin in the middle of everything. I’m not hugely useful these days but if I’m translating one or two texts a day that’s pages Cas doesn’t have to translate, you know? I should stay here and work as long as I can. It’s my fault Hell is still open. I should do what I can.” 

“But you don’t want to stay.”

“Is it that obvious?” His mouth quirked up again. 

“I’m fighting a strong urge to put an arrow through your brother’s eye socket,” she admitted. “My brothers might be willing to come here but it’s not the best idea, especially given your brother’s proclivities.”

“Excuse me?”

“Stake first, ask questions later.”

“Right.” He thought about it. “He’s getting better.”

“I suppose.”

“He hasn’t tried to stake you yet.” He took another sip of his coffee and made a mental note to inquire as to the state of the butler’s hard won soul. Coffee this good was well outside the Winchesters’ budget. “He’s edgy. I screwed up again –“

“Sam, you didn’t screw this up. He asked you to stop.”

“I should have pushed on. I mean, look where we are now –“

“I really think you need to get out of here. Come out to California. Just for a couple of days. Get away from this hole in the ground. Breathe something besides dust and old books. Talk to someone who doesn’t make you feel guilty for five minutes.” He snorted. Good luck finding someone like that. “I promise, you can come back and work yourself into an even earlier grave after that if you really feel the need. Just come out and talk to my brothers, please. They might be able to help.”

He sighed. “Help with what, closing Hell? Fighting Abbadon? Fighting Metatron?”

“Maybe. Maybe they can help you.”

He shook his head. “Not a lot of chance of that.&rdquo

;

“Probably not, but it’s worth talking to them –“ 

“No. It’s not.” 

She caught his eyes. “I can think of quite a few people who would disagree.”

“They have that right.”

She pressed her lips together and turned away from the topic. “Okay. Fine. What about the other stuff? Abbadon or Metatron? Come talk to them about that then. They might have some ideas. They might be open to the idea of joining in. It’s worth a try.” 

He leaned his head back against the tree again. Dean would be pissed. Dean spent a lot of time being pissed at him. And Cas was right. What right did he really have to go traipsing off to California when the gates of Hell were still open, when the world was full of exiled angels? When all of Kevin’s sacrifices had been in vain? He wasn’t stupid enough to think that he’d actually be able to enlist the assistance of any of Artemis’ brothers. “Why are you even doing this, Artemis?” he asked. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful or anything, or ungracious. I’m just…”

“Suspicious of altruism,” his companion finished. “You should be, the way things have gone for you. You knew a guy once. Fellow by the name of Loki, right?” He nodded. “We weren’t close or anything, but he mentioned you and Dean a time or two. Kali, too, after he died. I know that you’re not exactly used to folks just doing things for you. Honestly, while I was grateful for your willingness to help Prometheus and his son I probably wouldn’t have come out and tried to help you until I heard from Gilliel. We don’t pay a lot of attention to angels and demons unless it becomes problematic. It’s going to become problematic now.”

“Which is why I should stay here and help as long as I can.”

“No,” she corrected. “You’ve earned some rest, Sam. And honestly, I think they’ll like you. And I think you’ll like them. You deserve the break.”

“I really don’t.”

She shook her head. “If that brother of yours could hear you say that he’d be packing your bag for you.”

“I don’t unpack it,” he confided. Why was he telling her that? “It’s just easier that way.”

“Good. Come on.” She stood up and held out a hand. After a moment’s hesitation he let her help him to his feet. What the hell. He could bring some books with him, right? Getting the hell away from the rest of the bunker buddies was probably in his best interests anyway. If nothing else it would mitigate the headaches. Maybe he couldn’t trust the angel and the goddess but what was the worst they could do – kill him? And he could always just close the gates of Hell in California. They walked back into the bunker. The argument was still in full swing. Sam shook his head (carefully) and got his bags. Then he grabbed a few books and his laptop. Finally he and Artemis exchanged glances, and Sam went and put a hand on Gilliel’s back. Dean’s face was red. Castiel was in the middle of what for him was an impassioned tirade against the concept of letting Sam leave the bunker. He had unleashed a stream of invective in Enochian that Sam had not heard since the Cage and all of it was directed against Crowley.

Gilliel rose, understanding Sam’s intent when he lightly touched her back. He cleared his throat and waited. The shouting continued. He caught Kevin’s eye. Kevin just shook his head. “Can I borrow your dagger?” he asked the goddess.

She considered for a moment. “You planning to do anything stupid?”

“Not at the moment.” She handed it over. He pounded the hilt on the table loudly enough to puncture the blue streak Cas was cussing up. “Thank you,” he said as silence descended, passing the weapon back to its owner. “I appreciate that most of you feel pretty strongly one way or another about this, but I’m going to California. I should be back in two or three days. I’m bringing a few texts to translate so we shouldn’t be slowed down by the trip, but I think it’s a good idea. They might be able to help with some translations and they might have some out-of-the-box ideas we hadn’t thought of.” Crowley smiled. It was the creepiest thing in the world, a smile on Crowley’s face. Kevin gave him the thumbs up too, and who expected that? He’d have thought Kevin would have the most objections to him getting out and about.

Dean stood up. “Sam, no. Don’t you see that they’re just trying to get you away?”

“For what, Dean? I’m not much good to anyone for anything like this. Like I said, I’m going to bring some work so if I’m feeling up for it I can get stuff done. We shouldn’t be slowed down. I’ll have my laptop. I’ll have my phone. I’ll be in touch. It’ll even be better, because you’ll be able to do your thing without worrying about whether or not I’ve fallen down in the shower or anything like that.”

“It’s hardly the time for pleasure junkets, Sam,” Cas frowned.

“That’s not what this is, Cas,” he promised. “It’s just me going to try to get us some help, that’s all,” he vowed. “I’ll be back in two or three days.”

Dean sighed. “I don’t like it.”

“I can see that.”

“You’re going to do it anyway.”

“Pretty much.” He sighed. “I love you Dean, and I know you don’t trust me –“

He banged his fist on the table. “It’s not like that!”

“Then have some faith,” he said. “I’ll call you tonight.” His companions flanked him and they escorted him outside before taking his arms, and the world went black.


	5. Chapter 5

Wine country had its own unique smell, and the aroma hit Sam as soon as he became aware of his surroundings. He got the unmistakable scents of rosemary, of lavender, of ripening grapes and soil. All of these were welcome changes from the usual dust-and-testosterone bouquet of the bunker that usually pervaded his life, combined with the rotting-meat smell of mealtimes. He inhaled deeply and coughed. Gilliel touched him and the coughing subsided.

Two men stood before them, well dressed with polite smiles. Artemis stepped forward to embrace them both. The dark-haired brother was a little more forward, a little shorter maybe. He gave his sister a welcoming hug and stepped aside for his companion. Artemis’ exchange with this one was deeper, more profound. They looked nothing alike but he could only be Apollo, her twin. “You must be Gilliel, the angel,” the dark-haired god greeted as the twins reunited. He held out a hand, which Gilliel shook. “I’m sorry to hear about your current troubles, although I can’t imagine we’d meet otherwise. That must make you Sam Winchester. I’m Dionysus. Pleased to meet you.”

Sam took the proffered hand. “Likewise.” Dionysus looked perfectly normal – dark, unspeakably handsome, but normal. When Sam touched his hand he could feel the immense power seething beneath the skin. It wasn’t so much like sensing an electrical surge. It was more like… touching an immense dam, and feeling the strain behind it. “So… wine country, huh?”

“Would you expect to find me anyplace else?” The deity laughed. “I’ve had this place for a little over a hundred years now. It’s been great. Up here no one really cares what you get up to, and of course the microclimate is just top of the charts.”

“So you do actually produce wine here.”[>

“Oh yeah. Highly rated, in fact, and we do tours down at the production facility. I’m a legitimate businessman. I pay taxes and everything.” He laughed again. “Don’t worry. Up here is perfectly private. You’re as safe here as you would be in that bunker my sister told me about.” 

The twins managed to separate. “Sam, Gilliel. Let me introduce my brother Apollo,” the huntress insisted. She looked as relaxed and as happy as Sam had ever seen her. 

The blond shook hands as needed. “I’m very pleased to meet you both. Artemis has told me a lot about you both. Welcome to wine country. Let me show you to your rooms, and then we’ll see about getting you something to eat.” He led the way into the house that seemed to have been built into the side of the mountain. “I hope the journey wasn’t difficult for you, Sam.”

He blinked. “No, I’ve kind of gotten used to getting zapped around like that. It was a little weird at first I guess, but hey – at least I don’t have to fold myself like a pretzel to get into it. Not having to listen to Led Zep 4 sixteen times in a row is an added bonus.”

The sun god snickered. “Ah yes. I’ve heard that riding in the Impala can be… an adventure.”

His mind raced. Who would Apollo know who had been in the Impala? “Kali?”

“Yes. She had a few things to say about it. For what it’s worth though she had nothing but nice things to say about you, Sam.” He grinned. They’d passed through a sterile-looking parlor or great room or whatever the realtors were calling it these days and into a huge kitchen that had to be mostly for show, right?

The dietary habits of the gods he’d met didn’t bear thinking about. 

There were stairs now, but there was a railing so that was okay. “How is she doing these days?” he asked. “We haven’t heard anything about her in a while.”

“She’s well. You’ll probably see her tonight. Dionysus is having a little get-together – planned it a while ago, your being here is an added bonus. Don’t worry, this isn’t another Elysian Fields thing. I – look, none of us were involved with that. The three of us, I mean.”

“I know,” he said. “I remember.”

“I hope you’re not… upset…”

“I’m not holding any grudges,” he assured his host. Was Apollo his host? Dionysus seemed to be the owner – he’d used the first person singular when talking about the facility. Grammar was important. Grammar could kill. “I mean, they were trying to stop the Apocalypse too, right? There’s not a lot we wouldn't have done to stop it ourselves.” Of course, it had all gone sideways, hadn’t it? Most things did. “I just hope people aren’t going to blame me for how things turned out that night.”

“Sam, how things turned out that night was not your fault,” Gilliel insisted from behind him. “Lucifer is responsible for his own behavior, and as for your being there in the first place – well, that was engineered by the people who ultimately paid the price.” 

“Right. I know.” Her quiet voice spoke the truth and on some level he knew she was right, but still – if he’d been allowed to stay dead after Cold Oak none of it would have happened at all. If he’d been stronger, able to resist Ruby’s blandishments or suss out her actual mission, Lucifer would have still been in his Cage (and alone.) 

She put a hand on his arm. “Sam, stop. It was not your fault.”

“Are you reading my mind?”

She laughed a little. “Just your face.” 

The room to which Apollo guided him was nice. The window looked out over Napa Valley. There was a private bathroom, and a king-sized bed. It wasn’t lavish, but it was tasteful and well appointed. Gilliel sat on the chair near the window. Apollo raised an eyebrow. “We have plenty of rooms, Gilliel,” he offered.

“I will watch over Sam,” she told him.

“I really don’t need a baby-sitter, Gilliel,” he demurred, feeling the blush spread all the way down his neck.

“It is my pleasure, Sam,” she insisted. “I am a celestial being. I don’t sleep, and your sleep is frequently disturbed. I promised your brother that I would care for you in his absence.” She smiled, and Sam just couldn’t push back anymore. If she wanted to be creepy she could be creepy. He had to admit that fewer nightmares was a nice thing. 

“Fine, but you have to try and have some fun too. Party full of gods, there has to be someone interesting to talk to.”

She went into the Angelic Head Tilt. “Sam, you’re interesting to talk to,” she insisted.

Apollo shook his head. “All right, you two. Let’s get you fed.” Sam didn’t even try to look him in the eye. Creepy Stalker Angel was officially creepy, but everything to do with angels was pretty creepy to be honest. He just couldn’t find it in himself to try harder to push this one away. Her creepiness came off so innocently that it was almost charming. 

Apollo led them back outside. When they’d arrived Sam had been a little too disoriented to really notice much about the actual surroundings, but now he could. The patio wrapped all the way around the house and stuck out over the side of the mountain, creating an artificial cliff. He supposed that being a god had its perks. Artemis and Dionysus sat at a table with a few other places set. “I hope everything was to your liking,” Dionysus greeted. “I was just catching up with my sister here.” A woman – human looking, pretty, brunette – appeared and poured white wine for everyone. 

“Everything is great,” Sam told his host. “Just great.” The brunette made eye contact with him and smiled. Sam stared at his plate, pretending he didn’t see Dionysus smirk. 

“I understand we have you and your brother to thank for saving Prometheus’ son,” Apollo said. “Thank you, Sam. It’s something that I don’t think any of us would have been able to do.”

“We didn’t actually know about him until you got involved,” Dionysus hastened to add. “Dad played that one kind of close to the vest, I guess. We’ve been keeping a close eye on him, though, and you’ll be happy to know he’s doing well. Adjusting well, you know, all things considered.”

Sam took a sip of his wine. He’d seen the stuff come out of the bottle, it smelled like wine, Gilliel wasn’t warning him about anything. Of course, they were gods. They could alter what they wanted, right? And it wasn’t as though angels were trustworthy. But, he reminded himself, he’d agreed to this. What was the worst they could do? And the wine was good. It reminded him of one time he’d come up here back about a zillion years ago, with Jess and her family during spring break. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “How’s Haley doing?”

“Less well,” Apollo admitted. “Her guilt is crippling.”

He knew a bit about that, he supposed. “Does she have help? You know, with the kid?”

“Persephone’s with them right now. She’s trustworthy, and not a big fan of Dad as a general rule.” Well, that would make sense. “Her mother has volunteered to stay with them when Persephone cannot.” Demeter would probably be as much a fan of Zeus as Persephone would, he supposed.

“As difficult as the whole situation was,” Artemis continued, looking away, “you’ve really kind of freed a lot of people up. “

He bit his lip. “Is she still stuck?” he blurted. “I mean, if your father…” 

The siblings exchanged glances. “We’re not sure,” Apollo admitted. “We won’t know for certain until October.”

And Sam wouldn’t be around for October. No one said it but no one needed to. His brain raced. He thought he remembered something from the library at the bunker, but he wasn’t sure. He wouldn’t get their hopes up. “She must be very nice,” he said instead. “Volunteering to watch Prometheus’ kid like that.”

“Oh yes,” Artemis smiled. “She loves kids.” They were saved from the awkward discussion by the re-appearance of the waitress with more salad. Who seriously had a waitress at their house anyway? Gods, he supposed. The woman let her arm brush against his as she passed him. Fortunately he expected the contact and was able to remain still. Strangely enough the salad didn’t seem to turn his stomach. He couldn’t eat much of it, only about half, but it was enough. 

“So you’re having a party tonight,” Sam said by way of conversation.

“Yeah, well, you know, just a little get together, nothing too big,” the god of wine told him, refilling his glass. “We planned it a while ago. It should be pretty mellow. Nothing to worry about.”

“All gods, or –” He trailed off. How weird was his life, that he even had to ask that question?

“No. Mostly supernaturals, though. You’ll be the most human person there, though, so that’s something.” Apollo laughed. For a moment Sam froze, unsure of whether he should be offended or frightened. Then he laughed. If the laugh had a little touch of hysteria to it, well, who was to know or care? “That probably doesn’t happen to you very often, does it, Sam?”

“When it does it usually isn’t good,” he admitted, taking a sip from his glass. “Folks don’t generally mention it either.”

Artemis snorted. “They wouldn’t. It will be fine, Sam. Just a little get together. Dionysus can’t let more than a few days go by without entertaining, but his entertainments are usually pretty safe these days.”

“For a given value of safe,” Dionysus added quickly with a smirk. “As safe as the participants want them to be, anyway. I’m still me, after all.”

“Behave, brother,” the sun god objected. “I think you’re frightening the angel.”

“Angels are not supposed to feel fear,” Gilliel intoned serenely. “Of course, we are also not generally accustomed to the consumption of salad.”

“Did you just make a joke?” Sam asked her.

She winked. He couldn’t help it. He grinned. 

Lunch turned to more general topics, if general topics could be thought to include inaccuracies in Homer and Herodotus’ biases. Against everything he knew, against everything he’d been trained to believe, Sam found himself starting to relax. He actually liked these people. In his experience pagan gods were… well, dicks, to put it mildly. Until Prometheus he hadn’t met a pagan god he hadn’t been perfectly comfortable taking out. Now though he found himself sitting around, eating lunch and shooting the breeze with some. The same frankly went for angels. Balthazar had been okay, in that he never treated Sam any differently than he treated anyone else. Otherwise, angels generally got on Sam’s nerves on the best of days and made his paranoia go all wobbly on the worst. Gilliel seemed different. She had a sense of humor and a gentleness that no angel he’d ever met before had ever possessed. Of course, Lucifer had come off as gentle too. At first. So there was that.

After lunch Gilliel strongly recommended that he take a nap in preparation for the party, and he had to acknowledge that it wasn’t a bad idea. It wasn’t like he’d have any trouble falling asleep. Gilliel followed, though, and mojoed him into a pleasantly dreamless oblivion. He probably should have been more disturbed by that, actually. One minute he was going “splat” on a bed that dwarfed him, bathed in sunlight, and the next he was looking at the setting sun while “his” angel removed her hand from his face. “Sam, the party will be starting soon,” she told him with a small smile. “You should wake up and dress. Also, your brother will begin to worry.” 

“Begin?” he sighed, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from his face. “Thanks, Gilliel. I’ll give him a call.” He looked. “You look nice!” The angel had exchanged her hunter-chic garb for a casual dress and sandals. 

She actually blushed a little. “Do you actually like it? I asked Artemis what would be appropriate and she showed me some pictures in a catalogue…”

“You mojoed that up?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I am an angel.”

Cas had never mojoed himself new clothes. He shook his head. “Oh – okay. Yeah. Of course.” 

“No longer being tethered to Heaven means that no one cares how we dress anymore, Sam,” she explained. “If no one is available to object to my association with you, no one is going to care if I wear a pretty dress instead of a pants suit.” And maybe Metatron was the second douchiest Angel in history – or maybe the third, he corrected himself – but there was a silver lining to every cloud because damn if Gilliel didn’t seem to be having fun with her newfound freedom.

He chuckled. “You have a point.” He stretched. “All right. Let me call Dean and I’ll get ready.”

“I’ve hung your most appropriate clothing up in the bathroom,” she told him, and departed for parts unknown. He sighed and grabbed his phone. Angelic valet. Demon butler. His life was weird.

Dean picked up on the second ring. “Sammy, thank God,” he breathed. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Dean. I took a nap.” He rolled his eyes. 

“You didn’t eat anything, did you?”

“What?” 

“If you eat anything you have to stay in Hades forever.” 

He paused and tried to tune his brain in to whatever waves Dean was riding. “Uh, only if Hades is hitting on you,” he replied. “Which he isn’t. I’m pretty sure he’s not welcome here. So far it’s just Artemis, Dionysus and Apollo.” 

“Oh, okay. Wait – Dionysus?”

“Yeah. Nice guy.” He thought about telling him about the winery, but then he thought better of it. He didn’t entirely trust his brother not to come bursting in looking to eliminate every deity in the place. “How’s everything back there?”

“Fine, fine. Cas is a natural with a sawed-off. Talked to Charlie, she says hi. How are you feeling?”

Like my legs are made of lead. “Fine. I’m fine. The air out here is good for me, man. Find anything interesting in the library?”

“Nah. Another couple of stoner scrolls and a dirty Latin treatise involving debauched nuns.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s real though. I’m pretty sure that the monk writing it down had no idea how a woman’s body actually works. Made Kevin turn bright red though, so I guess it was worth it.” Sam snickered. Dean had probably insisted on translating out loud just to screw with the poor kid. “Best part? I asked Cas to do the translating. Out loud.”

Yahtzee. “Nice,” he said. “So we’re going to have an opportunity to do a little networking earlier than I thought. Apparently Dionysus is throwing a little soiree tonight.”

“Dude. You’re going to a divine kegger? Are you sure that’s a good idea? It didn’t work out so well the last time.” His brother’s words were mellow. His tone was strangled.

“No one who’s coming tonight was involved with that mess.” Well, except one, but Dean didn’t need to know that right now. It was wrong to lie to him, but it was more wrong to let him have a stroke. “I don’t think they’re planning to make me the main course or anything.”

“Maybe they’re going to offer you up to someone. Abbadon, maybe. Have you thought about that, Sam?” he seethed. 

“Dude, have you forgotten what my blood does to demons right now? I’m pretty sure Abbadon doesn’t want to get splashed.” He had to admit that the possibility lurked at the back of his mind, but what the hell. He had to take the risk. “Hey, listen, is Kevin around? I need to ask him something.”

“Dude, just don’t eat any pomegranates and call me first thing tomorrow, okay?” There was a pause. “Kevin? Yo, Kev!” Another pause, and then a different voice. “Sam?”

“Hi, Kevin. How’s bunker life?”

“They keep staring at each other, Sam. Like, for ten minutes at a stretch. I keep feeling like I need a shower whenever I’m around them.”

He considered that. “I guess you’ve got two options. Drink yourself into oblivion or keep a fire bucket filled with cold water nearby at all times.”

Kevin did the math. “I don’t want to get water all over the library. What about a water gun?”

“Excellent choice. You’ll go far in life, young padawan.” He let himself smile a little. “Listen, I seem to remember a text we found, uh, a week or so ago. The reference was in Latin but the text was cuneiform, I think it was actually Babylonian or maybe Elamite. Number 50-894-something. The note on it was something like ‘Babylonian, curses, removal.’ Does this sound at all familiar?” 

“Hmm…” He heard the sound of keyboard clicks in the background. “Yeah. 50-89463. Good memory, Sam. You forgot about the cursing though.”

“Cursing?”

“You left out the bits about ‘fucking useless for heaven or hell.’ Those notes are Cas’, though.”

“Right.” Cas had at least taken to profanity well. “Look, I need a favor. Can you scan that manuscript and email it to me?”

“What for? I mean, if it’s useless for Heaven or Hell, why bother?”

“Goodwill. Maybe. I don’t know. Just send it to me and I’ll figure out a way to get Dean to stop Cas from reading bad monkish slash fiction to you.”

“You’ve got a deal,” the teen said a little too quickly. “All right, Crowley wants to talk now.”

He started to object, but the sounds of being passed off were unmistakable. “Sam!” came the pleasant voice of the former demon. “Dean tells me you’ve got plans for the evening – a drinks do with Dionysus.”

“Always avoid alliteration, Crowley,” Sam replied automatically, and the Scotsman snickered. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, it was planned months ago. I’m just along for the ride.”

“Good for you. Have fun. I’d have pushed for a two-week sojourn in Amsterdam, but I don’t think Big Brother would have gone for it. Listen, since you’ll be gone for a few days I thought it might be a good time to make your room a little more comfortable.”

“’More comfortable?’ Crowley, my room is fine the way it is. I don’t need anything else.” He rubbed the base of his nose. He shouldn’t have bothered checking in.

“Sam, it looks like a prison cell. I thought some new sheets – a little bit of a higher thread count, maybe – would be a little more comfortable for you. And maybe a new mattress. Something a little less cold war. Maybe memory foam, like your brother’s?”

The memory foam here was certainly comfortable. It drove the ache in his limbs back like nothing else. “Nah. It’s a waste.” “A waste?” “You’re just going to have to throw it out in a few weeks. The mattress I have is fine, Crowley. It’s not like it was ever really used much. Thanks for the thought, though. It was really kind of you.” The last thing he needed was a weepy demon. Ex-demon. Whatever.

“Sam –“ he said, sounding sad. 

“I meant to check in about the coffee you made, though. Did you bespell the coffee pot, Crowley?”

“Moi?”

“You.”

“Maybe a little.”

“I knew it tasted too good…”

That got a little chuckle out of him. “Relax, Sam. White magic only. I still remember, and frankly the stuff your brother buys tastes like gym socks.” He had to admit it was true. “You have fun at your party. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Or have done.” 

“There’s not a lot you wouldn’t have done, Crowley.”

“True. But hey – at least I’ve had my limits. Listen, there’s a certain former angel here looking to chat, and he’s becoming rather insistent.”

The phone was passed off again, and then Cas’ voice came through. “Sam? Dean tells me you’re going to a party tonight. Is this really the best time for festivities?” 

“No,” he replied. “But I wasn’t aware of the plans when I got here, and it would be offensive to hole myself up. Besides, one of the other guests might have some leads that we don’t.” He closed his eyes. He hadn’t really thought about the whole Heaven problem, or the Hell problem, since he’d arrived. He’d actually turned his brain to a completely different problem, completely unrelated to the task at hand. What the hell was wrong with him? “Any new leads in the archives?”

“Not yet. Dean thought there might be something of use in an account of the investigation of the nunnery of Saint Mary of Egypt but as it turns out it was useless. We searched the entire volume for clues but there were none.”

Sam found himself grateful that he was not required to keep a straight face, just a calm and collected voice. “Well, all we can do is keep trying. We’ll see what comes up.”

“How is my sister?” he asked after a moment. “I’m worried about her in the company of…”

Of an abomination. Right. Because even too weak to stand for long periods of time he was still a threat to the purity of everyone around him. “She’s great. She gets along well with our hosts well enough. She seems happy enough.” He glanced at the door. “She’s wandered off – she and Artemis have gotten close, I think they might be together. I can ask her to give you a call later though.”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

The phone was passed off again and Dean returned. “Hey, Sammy. Look, I’m sure you’ve got to go get ready or something. Have your fun or whatever, just remember – nothing good comes of collaborating with gods, right?”

“Yeah, Dean. I know.” He sighed. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning, okay man?”

“Don’t eat anything, Sam.”

“Right, Dean.”

“Don’t drink anything, either.”

“Okay, Dean.”

“Don’t screw –“

“Goodbye, Dean.” He hung up.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Networking works.

Sam had never been what one would call a party animal. Parties were more of a Dean thing when they’d been kids. For all that Dean had been the one to go along with their father’s “normal is for other people” mantra, he’d been the one to have the more typical high school experience in their forty-odd high schools. Sam had not been welcome at most parties back then. Apparently teenagers had some kind of instinct that warned them what a freak he was, some kind of abomination-o-meter. Being a scrawny and short little twerp in thrift store hand me downs probably hadn’t helped. By the time he made it to college – no longer short and apparently not exactly unattractive, or so he’d been told – the whole abomination thing seemed to be less of an issue for people. Keeping his scholarship, on the other hand, was very much A Thing and he’d been unwilling to jeopardize his only ticket out of Winchesterland. He’d gone to a few parties with Jess and with Brady here and there but he’d mostly just nursed a token drink or two and lurked menacingly in corners. Then of course Jess had died and he’d been dragged back into the crap-storm of a life that he’d so desperately tried to flee. Opportunities for social life of any kind, never mind festive life, had been few and far between.

He could think of… well, two actual parties he’d been to since returning to the hunting life. Both of them were in the months before the final showdown at Stull, before his sojourn in the Cage. The first had been the night before Carthage, when they’d gathered with Ellen and Jo and Cas to make merry at Bobby’s house before attempting to kill Lucifer. The other was at Elysian Fields, when they’d been trapped and used as bait at a gathering of gods…

Neither memory was one that Sam wanted to encourage right now.

Gilliel and Artemis appeared at the door. “Are you ready, Sam?” the former inquired politely. 

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” he told them, hauling himself to his feet. 

Artemis laughed. “You look like you expect to be the virgin sacrifice. Relax, Sam. It’s just a casual get together.” Of course, with her in that dress nothing was likely to be casual. Her usual costume was black leather, and so was her dress. It managed to come off as extremely alluring and downright armorial at the same time, and he was pretty sure clothing wasn’t supposed to do both. Maybe gods’ tailors had different skill sets. In another time and another place he’d have been badly distracted, and even now he had a hard time looking away. Just as well that the Trials had left him too weak to do more than walk or stand briefly. She’d probably start chopping bits off for the thought alone. “Come on, Sam. People are already here.”

He kept his mouth shut and followed his hostess down the stairs and out to the patio. Earlier the space had seemed almost absurdly huge. As more people began to fill the area it seemed less ridiculous. The homeowner approached, a stunning brunette on his arm. “Sam, Gilliel!” the wine god greeted. “I’m glad you could make it! I don’t think you’ve met my better half yet. This is my wife, Ariadne.” 

The lady shook their hands. “I’m very pleased to meet you both,” she smiled before embracing her sister-in-law. Sam’s mind raced. Ariadne had been a daughter of King Minos. Theseus had abandoned the Cretan princess on Naxos after fleeing the island. Most popular versions of the myth had her dying alone and forgotten on the island, but some of the older versions of the myth had her being rescued and married by Dionysus. Apparently the older versions were more accurate because here she was in front of him, signaling to a server. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Nice job with the Leviathan, Sam. They were… unpleasant.”

“Thanks,” he demurred, “but that was mostly my brother and my… and Bobby Singer. I was kind of out of it for a lot of that.”

“Nonsense,” Gilliel objected. “The fact that you were dealing with other issues just makes your contribution more impressive – and your contribution was equal to your brother’s.”

Artemis nudged him gently with her elbow. “No self-deprecation tonight, Sam. It’s a party.” As a server approached she grabbed glasses of wine for herself and her two companions. “Enjoy! Hey, I see Rundas and Neith over there, I haven’t seen either of them in a while. I’ll see you in a bit.” She walked away animatedly, waving to a vaguely Mediterranean-looking pair standing near the edge. The pair greeted her with warm affection. Sam vaguely recollected the names as belonging to Hittite and Egyptian hunting deities.

“Your winery is lovely, madam,” Gilliel told their hostess by way of small talk. “You must have put a great deal of work into it.”

“Oh yes,” she assured them. “But over the course of centuries it hardly seems as difficult. We’re very proud of our product, of course.” She smiled again. She had a radiant smile. It was easy to see why Dionysus had carried her away from the island. Why Theseus had left her there was a little harder to discern. He’d never been Sam’s favorite mythological figure anyway. 

Dionysus gestured at the growing crowd. “Come, come. There are plenty of people who still want to meet you both. Would you believe that most gods have never knowingly met an angel?”

“We’ve never been encouraged to mix,” she admitted. Sam sipped from his glass and tried to remember a time when Cas had met a god. He couldn’t easily think of one. “It leads to disobedience.”

Ariadne’s dark eyes flashed merrily. “Does that bother you?”

“There is no one left to disobey,” the angel replied. If Cas had said it the words would have sounded grim, fatalistic. Gilliel seemed accepting. Of course, her first response upon having Fallen was to seek out the abomination, so perhaps she wasn’t the good little soldier Cas thought she’d been. “My experience so far has been limited but enjoyable.”

“Let’s hope we can continue that trend then.” It was the husband this time. Sam had to hope his blush wasn’t visible in the relative darkness. The undercurrent was unmistakable and this was Dionysus, after all. He led them toward a small cluster. “My friends, let me introduce Gilliel, Angel of the Lord and Sam Winchester. Gilliel and Sam, these are Airmed, Haoma and Erinle.” The three gods –a vaguely Western female with what looked to be a south or south-west Asian and an African male – greeted them pleasantly enough. They managed a brief small talk exchange during which Sam found himself sweating bullets and then they were pulled away by their host for another encounter with another divine cluster. With each meeting Sam’s comfort level increased, although he never reached a point where he could call the situation “comfortable” or “enjoyable” or “not terrifying.” He supposed that to some extent he could be forgiven that discomfort. After all, he’d spent the better part of his life fighting creatures like this, gods or not. Only this year he’d helped to trap Zeus, only to have him killed when things went sideways. A couple years ago he’d personally iced Chronos and put Osiris down for a very, very long nap. (“Whoever said Dean’s the dysfunctional one hasn’t seen you with a sharp object in your hands.” Those had been the words of an archangel, but he’d been masquerading as a god. It still counted, right? The words still rang in his head at night, however Gabriel’s species was reckoned.) At any rate, the encounters got easier because they became rote. “Hi. Pleased to meet you. Yes, that Winchester. No, Dean isn’t here this evening. Oh, wow. Really? Yes, I’d love to hear about (x) time in (y place) with (z mythological creature.)” It really didn’t change much and to be honest it wasn’t much different than playing Fed and talking to witnesses. They might be gods but they were still just people. People who might well kill him with a thought for the mere fun of it, but people. And really, what would be the harm in that? They would just be speeding the process up.

To be honest, if he got around to it later he really wouldn’t mind hearing about x time in y place with z mythological creature from most of them, either. Assuming that they didn’t decide to get all wrath-of-god on him, that was. He loved that stuff. Even just hanging around with Artemis here and there was a treat. Some people got excited to meet their favorite celebrities. He got to meet the heroes of his favorite myths from his childhood and – here was the best part – he probably wouldn’t have to try to figure out a way to kill them. To be honest it was a pretty nice way to spend an evening, or it would be if he could tone down the paranoia and the shaky legs. The paranoia would probably never really go away, of course. He’d spent quite a bit of time having to deal with gods, and of course having to deal with them meant having to kill them. The fever that had come with the advent of the third trial and meeting the loathsome Metatron had resulted, oddly enough, in a significantly unlocked memory and that was both a blessing and a curse. The grasp of a hand from, say, the Celtic god Lenus was not merely a handshake. On the one hand the pale grasping hand, connected to pale blue eyes and light blond hair, called to mind Lucifer’s hands and if there was one thing Sam did not want to think about ever, ever again it was Lucifer’s icy hands. On the other hand, he was able to remember that Lenus was a god belonging to eastern Gaul, had been a god of healing that was somehow identified with the Roman god of war (and how was that supposed to work?), and that if he were stabbed with an oaken stake dipped in a mixture of pig’s blood and powdered agate he would be killed. He didn’t even need to try to remember that, the formula sprang unbidden to his mind just as much as the feeling of Lucifer’s hands against his hips. Because he’d scanned the formula briefly in a book once at Bobby’s, waiting for Dean to get out of the can, and somehow that memory was just as sharp and just as uncontrollable as however many years in the Cage.

He’d also noticed patterns in the guests’ behavior. Deities tended to group together not by geography, but by profession. The healers tended to get together to talk shop, as did the hunters and the scholars and the artists. The party wasn’t just a gathering of gods, of course. He met centaurs. Who knew that there were actual centaurs in America? How had they even gotten here? He hadn’t been raised in a barn so he didn’t ask. They seemed to be pretty nice guys for the most part, though. Maybe their sense of humor was a little earthy but hey – he’d grown up with Dean, for crying out loud. He could deal with a few fart jokes. There were nymphs, and a few faeries (no evil leprechauns, though, thank … er, whoever). Even the ones who looked human didn’t feel human, not with whatever was going on inside his bloodstream now. He’d been able to feel the angel when she’d been outside the bunker and he could feel the difference between her and the gods around them, and he could feel the difference between all of the different supernatural creatures present tonight even if he couldn’t name them.

As promised, he seemed to be the most human person there. Even the serving staff was entirely otherworldly.

The one thing that the party lacked was underworld deities. That changed when Kali arrived. She was as beautiful as she’d been the last time Sam had seen her, although perhaps a bit more composed. His host and hostess left to greet her and her companions, leaving Sam alone with Gilliel in a dark corner. “How are you doing, Gilliel?”

“I’m fine, Sam,” she replied. “I’m having a very good time. I can understand why Gabriel preferred this family to ours. They seem much warmer.”

“They have their moments,” he replied. “All families do.” His phone buzzed against his leg. “Speaking of which.” He checked. “Hi, Cas.”

“Sam, are you still at the party?”

“Cas, it’s been like half an hour. Yes, I’m still at the party.” He rolled his eyes. 

“You should be working on your translations, Sam.”

Gilliel caught his eye. “Is that my brother?” He nodded. “Let me speak to him.”

“Gilliel wants to talk to you,” he warned the former angel and handed the phone over. 

The fallen angel switched to Enochian, although Sam could of course understand her. He assumed the switch was to avoid awkwardness with their companions, who were far enough away to not pick up most of the conversation anyway. “Castiel, hello. How are you?” Pause. “Have you made any progress on your end yet?” Pause. “Indeed. So you have made no progress and you think it a fit use of your time to call and berate a sick man for spending a night out among friends?” Pause, a brief pause that suggested that Cas was probably sitting with his jaw hanging open somewhere back in the bunker. “I’m sorry, I must be misunderstanding whatever customs you’ve picked up on here. I must have missed the part where it is Sam’s job to pick up your slack.” Pause. “No. He is entitled to some pleasure in life, Castiel, and I will not allow you to try to guilt him into an earlier grave than seems to be necessary. He will get the necessary amount of rest, and he will be encouraged to relax, and if he can be encouraged to meet some people whose company he can enjoy and who are actually capable of thinking about him for a minute or two then that can only be for the common good. Think about it this way, Castiel. If he is relaxed and rested he will be better able to focus on your issues.” Pause, a longer pause this time as Sam hid his face in his hands. “All right, think about it this way. I am here now and I am not going to allow you to make his time more miserable than it has to be. Is that sufficiently clear for you?” She hung up the phone. It began ringing again, but she sent it to voice mail and then the phone disappeared. “I sent it to your room,” she assured him, still in Enochian. “My brother is not showing his best side to you right now.”

“He’s upset,” Sam tried to explain. “He feels just awful about being duped by Metatron.”

“I’m sure he does. He should. His desperation resulted in disaster, after his pride caused a disaster of epic proportions. I sometimes think his pride exceeded even… you know, the other one’s. And that’s ignoring what he’s done to you. None of that excuses his behavior toward you right now. If your brother will not stand up for you I will.”

He looked away. There was no real way to explain to Gilliel that really, Cas was right. He shouldn’t be here, sipping wine in the cool night air. He had no right to meet all of these interesting, divine creatures. Not in any kind of positive way, anyway. He had no right to even be in her presence. “Thanks,” he said instead, not meeting her eyes.

Some music started up somewhere, something weird and tonal with a strange beat that the hunter couldn’t identify. A few of the nymphs started dancing with some of the centaurs, which was fine. Some of the gods danced amongst themselves. Apollo was out there, a graceful figure with a lithe dark-skinned woman with an Egyptian-style necklace. Artemis reappeared. “Have you had anything to eat?” she asked her friends. At the shake of their heads she signaled a server. “It’s mostly hors d’oeuvres, but they’re all pretty good. Don’t worry – no people,” she promised. “Most of us don’t really go in for that. Kali will if it’s offered, but she doesn’t require it to be on the menu.” The various gods were starting to mingle a little more. Sam helped himself to a stuffed mushroom. Dean would flip his lid. He would probably be hard pressed to avoid stuffing himself with everything in sight, though. Eventually a dark-skinned man with prominent cheekbones and longish dark hair invited Gilliel to dance with him; after a little urging from Sam (necessary; the angel had never actually danced before) she accepted. Artemis stayed by his side, although he encouraged her to go enjoy herself too. Instead she summoned servers with tidbits on a fairly regular basis, and on a schedule like that he actually managed to get more food into his stomach than he had in a long time. He felt terrible that she was hanging around babysitting him instead of enjoying the company of her friends and family, but if she minded she didn’t show it. She did share little bits of information about their companions, though. Apparently Gilliel’s dance partner was some kind of Nabataean deity by the name of Orotalt. That one was so obscure that Sam couldn’t remember having come across him ever before, but he’d make a point of looking him up when he got back to Kansas. Apparently her twin had been seeing the Egyptian goddess he currently danced with (Pakhet) for some time – it had been forbidden by their father, of course, but with him gone now they could be more open. Gilliel danced with Dionysus next, and the strange flirtation between the deity, his wife and the angel seemed to continue. Whatever. If she was okay with it, and they were okay with it, it wasn’t Sam’s place to wonder. Gilliel seemed to enjoy the flirtation at least. His interaction with angels had been limited and almost entirely negative, but Dean’s angel had given them a very mistaken impression when it came to angels and sexual interactions. To go by Cas would be to believe that angels were without desire, without interest in anything but war and Heaven. (Except he’d been getting the distinct impression that wasn’t entirely true, and others had as well.) Gabriel had buried the needle in the opposite end of that spectrum, and Balthazar had followed closely behind. Where Gilliel was going to fall was … none of his business, he reminded himself as she settled into the rhythm of the dance. Nowhere near any of his business.

Kali chose this moment to approach. Sam hated to admit that he felt a little knot form in his stomach. It was stupid to feel fear. What, after all, was the worst she could do? No matter what punishment she dealt out he’d been through worse. He tried to keep that in mind as he met her eyes. God, she was beautiful. Not beautiful in a way that he would ever dream of approaching, of course. Even if he’d been healthy he wouldn’t try anything with her. “Kali,” he greeted, and he was surprised to notice that his voice was perfectly steady. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, and under better circumstances.”

“Sam Winchester,” she greeted with a thin smile. “It’s indeed a pleasure. You look… better than expected, all things considered.” She shook his hand and held it for a moment. “You’re unwell?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Not a big deal. How have you been? I assume you know Artemis.”

“We’ve met a few times.” They exchanged a neutral greeting. It was better than hostility. “I’ve been as well as can be expected, thank you. I’ve been spending more time in my homeland, re-charging I suppose.” She shrugged and indicated her companion, a young woman in a white dress. “I’d like you to meet Saraswati. I thought you’d enjoy meeting her; I think you’ll find you’ve got certain interests in common.” She smiled again, that thin smile that seemed so unaccustomed and forced and downright alien on her face.

Sam forced a smile of his own at Saraswati and hoped it didn’t look too tired. A server showed up with wine; he was happy to accept another glass. Kali and Artemis stood apart from Sam and Saraswati for a moment, clearly having something divine or possibly just destructive to discuss. “Hi,” Sam said. “I’m Sam.”

“I know,” she replied. “I’m very pleased to meet you. I understand you’re the last remaining Man of Letters?”

He blinked. “I… my brother and I are, I suppose. How do you know about the Men of Letters?”

“We’ve known about them for centuries, Sam. I’m the goddess of scholarship. It’s my business to know about those guys.” She grinned, which somehow made her look almost impish. “It’s never seemed quite right to announce myself to them while they’ve been alive, though. They’re smart guys, for the most part, but that whole colonial-power thing is a little off-putting.”

“I get that,” he said. He frowned. “So how do you know about me and Dean?”

“I spoke to your grandfather, not too long ago. Artemis asked me to. It’s part of how she tracked you down. He was differently enthusiastic about being summoned from Heaven, but when I explained the situation to him and why we were looking for you he was willing to cooperate.” She smiled gently. “He is concerned for you, Sam.”

Sam gave a half-smile and tried not to snort. Henry had been nice enough. He’d shown him what might have been possible – you know, if the entire world had been different. He’d also been a lot more concerned with winning Dean’s good opinion regarding John than with bonding with Sam. It was okay – Henry could harness the power of his own damn soul to travel across five damn decades, he could probably manage to sense his grandson’s taint easily enough. It was just a little much to expect him to believe that his grandfather - hell, any family member other than Dean – was actually concerned for his well-being. “I suspect his concern about the state of Heaven probably had something to do with his willingness to help too,” he suggested gently.

Maybe the cheeriness in her eyes wavered just a bit. “Maybe. But he was worried, and he did say that if anyone could do something about what was going on there it was you.”

He let the polite fiction slide. “So you’ve been following the Men of Letters for a while, huh? I bet they must have had some interesting encounters.”

“I suppose. They were… inquisitive. Open minded for the most part, but inquisitive. I’ve never met a bunch of men who were more likely to say, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ Fortunately they were good about writing things down, so they rarely made the same mistake more than two or three times.” She shook her head. “Let’s sit down. I’d like to talk to you about Heaven.”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “The last time someone said that was outside an Ozzy show,” he admitted at her curious look.

She laughed. “I get it. You would be surprised at how often I am approached by those men. Or perhaps you wouldn’t be, at that.” She laughed. Kali and Artemis rejoined them as Sam and Saraswati found a table and chairs. “Listen, I know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now, but I’m kind of wondering what your priority is.”

“My priority?” “Your health, Heaven, Hell, Abbadon – you’ve got so many things going on right now. I want you to tell me which is the most important right now so that I can help you as best I can.” She leaned forward. “I have some ideas on where to start with most of them, but you need to tell me what your largest area of concern is.”

“Heaven,” he replied without hesitation.

“Is it really? Not Hell, or your health? Surely you’re aware that you haven’t much time left.” This was Kali, one elegant eyebrow raised.

He waved a hand. “That doesn’t matter. Metatron is holding Castiel’s grace in Heaven. If we can figure out a way to get that back then Dean will be able to tackle Abbadon just fine when I’m gone – it’s not like I’m much use to him the way I am now anyway, and if they can back-door it into Heaven they can probably do something about the Metatron problem and let the angels back into Heaven.” He glanced at Gilliel. “Those that want to go, anyway. Hell – well, yeah. It would have been nice to rid Earth of the demons and to keep other families from suffering the way mine did, the way Kevin’s did.” He felt the guilt welling up. He should have been stronger, he should have resisted Dean, he should have finished the goddamn job. “But it’s not like they’re anything new, you know? They’re a known quantity. We know how to fight demons. We know what to do about them. Dean and the others will be able to fight them just fine without me, especially if they can re-open Heaven.”

“Wouldn’t they be stronger for having you at their side?” Artemis suggested.

He laughed a little. “No. Not at all.” He met Saraswati’s eyes. “You asked where my priorities lay. I’m telling you – Heaven.”

The goddesses exchanged looks. “All right, Sam,” the scholarly divinity told him. “If you’re sure.” She closed her eyes and a sheet of hammered bronze appeared in front of her. She passed it over. “This text should help you to get started.”

He looked down at it. “Is that… Sanskrit?”

“A very early form,” she confirmed. “Why?”

“Er, my Sanskrit is a little… er…”

She smiled. “Is your education slightly lacking, Sam?”

He felt his cheeks flush. “Maybe a little,” he admitted. It was the truth.

“Let me give you a gift, then. Ordinarily I’d make you do this the hard way on general principles but I think time is of the essence.”

She reached out, but he pulled back. “Wait. Why are you helping?”

Kali laughed. “You don’t expect help from gods, Sam? Where is your faith?”

He considered telling her the truth – at the bottom of a very deep pit, in a cage, on fire. He didn’t think she actually wanted an answer. “Sorry. I guess I’ve just learned that most people who want to help usually have a price.”

Saraswati put a hand on his. “Sam, you’ve already paid your price, a thousand times over. The archangels would have destroyed the world. You saved it. It is hardly an effort to help you read a text, or to send you the occasional inscription.”

He considered her words. Half of him was screaming, “Bad idea! Bad idea!” And yet if this woman, this goddess could help even aim their team in the right direction it had to be worth the risk, right? Doing something had to be better than spinning their wheels. (And where had he heard that reasoning before? Oh yeah – when trusting Ruby to help him get Dean out of Hell had seemed like a good idea.) Desperate times, desperate measures. And it wasn’t like he wasn’t already Hell-bound anyway. “Okay. Thanks.” Her hand brushed against his forehead. There was a whispering sound, almost too soft for him to hear, and then contact was broken. “I’ll leave this in your room,” she told him. “You can peruse at your leisure tomorrow.” She gave him a winning smile and then disappeared.

Kali and Artemis looked at him. “She likes you,” Kali told him. “She thinks highly of your scholarship.”

He snorted. “I wish she could have met Bobby Singer.” He took a sip from his glass. He’d never been a big wine drinker, but he could certainly get used to this. Of course the kind of stores they frequented certainly wouldn’t carry product of this quality, and he didn’t think Ripple would have the same calming effect on his stomach. “It’s really nice of her to help. All of you, really.”

Kali smirked. “I don’t think anyone’s ever accused me of being nice before. I’ll try not to take it personally. Tell me, how is that brother of yours doing? Last I heard he had gone up against Death Itself or some such thing.”

“No, no. That angel friend of his – Cas – got caught up in something and went off the rails for a little while. He swallowed up all the souls in Purgatory and the only way to deal with him was… you know… Death.”

“Oh, come on,” said Artemis. “There’s a story there.”

Sam sighed. A few other people – beings – whatever – had heard the beginnings of that and clustered around. He didn’t like being the center of attention like that, but his hostess wanted him to tell the story. “Okay, well, there was this civil war in Heaven. Cas – he’s a good guy. He was just… well, he was stuck in a really bad situation, you know? He was losing the war in Heaven and if Raphael won he was going to re-start the whole Apocalypse. And Cas just couldn’t see any other way out of it other than absorbing all of these souls. We tried to stop him…” He continued the story, trying to minimize his own involvement as much as possible. After all, he didn’t exactly need everyone knowing he’d gone bonkers. Besides, he was toast around here in what, six weeks? Cas didn’t need a worse reputation than he was already going to have. Instead he focused on the details – the funnier parts, the insane little details that had made the whole thing even more surreal than their regular lives. The crowd increased during the telling. He tried not to notice. 

“Another one,” someone called out. Oh good Lord, what was he supposed to do now? What kinds of stories from their lives would entertain gods? Without offending them? Well, none of them were terribly fond of angels or demons. The story about Anna and the whole Godzilla vs. Mothra thing might be okay…

All in all he wound up telling stories for a couple hours. He made a real effort to keep the focus on good things, preferably good things about Dean and/or Castiel. He wanted them to have a tolerable opinion of his brother, after all. He told them about the Leviathan and the cursed objects, about Purgatory. He told them about the Benders and about the stupid racist truck. He even told them about that time they went to that idiotic television universe where they’d been trapped in Vancouver, which everyone apparently found hilarious. And to be honest, after the first couple of stories he started to relax a little. More so than he’d relaxed in a long time. It was still kind of harrowing, of course, because any one of his audience members could smite him by wrinkling its nose or whatever but he was actually having an okay time. Unfortunately his stamina wasn’t what it should have been and eventually his coughing fits became too much to handle. Gilliel came to escort him to bed, and he actually regretted leaving the party. When he got to his room he let her knock him out, barely noticing that there were actually two items on the dresser instead of one.


	7. Chapter 7

Sam slept for fourteen straight hours. They were remarkably good hours. He did not dream. Instead he rested. When he did wake he suspected angelic intervention, which was confirmed when Gilliel popped into his room within seconds of his eyes opening. “Good morning, Sam. Or afternoon, as the case may be,” she greeted pleasantly. “How do you feel?”

“Conscious,” he hazarded, pulling himself into a sitting position and wasn’t that special? He managed to do it without coughing. “How about you? How late did the party go?”

“I am well. The party continued until sunrise. Most of the guests do not sleep, as you know, although there is a knot of centaurs and maenads near the gazebo that I fear will require intervention. So I suppose that one could make a case for the party not actually being over depending on one’s interpretation.”

The hunter briefly tried to contemplate the physics involved and decided against it. His brain frankly rebelled against much of anything to do with the centaurs and sex. “If you want to break them up try buckets of cold water,” he recommended.

“Indeed?”

“Yeah. Dad sent me to a Salvation Army summer camp one year as a counselor-in-training or some crap. It was a cover, of course – camp director had drowned in the lake or something forty years before, haunting the place. That was the official method for letting people know that they were getting too close.” In hindsight maybe the wet T-shirt contest hadn’t been the best way of cooling adolescent hormones, but hey – that was what they were getting paid to do at the time.

She gave him a knowing look. “And how often did you encounter the bucket of cold water, Sam?”

He didn’t even blush. “Two or three. I was seventeen.” Such thoughts were long since beyond him now. Well, maybe not, but doing anything about them was. “Sorry I slept so late.”

“Why should you apologize? You obviously needed the sleep. Are you feeling up to food and coffee?” A hand brushed against his forehead. “Your fever is returning. You overexerted yourself yesterday.”

Christ, when had sitting on his ass and shooting the breeze for a few hours become overexertion? To be honest, the chattering act would have always been kind of exhausting for him. “Maybe a little,” he admitted. He felt the small rush of Grace into his system. “Thanks.”

“I’ll bring something up for you. You should rest a little more.”

“No, I shouldn’t be an antisocial hermit.” He tried to get up.

“Sam, they understand. Come down later on for dinner. They’ll be fine with it.” She smiled and poofed away.

Sam leaned back against the headboard. His phone was on the dresser, along with the bronze tablet and the book that Saraswati had given him yesterday. It was a stupid thing to think of, really. Stupid and silly. The Trials had done a number on his body and the fever had done some unpleasant things to his mind, but it had also blown through more than a few of his mental blocks and walls. Dean would be upset, but he wasn’t here. He forced his muscles, both mental and physical, to relax and grabbed the phone. It flew to his hand. He should be bothered by this. He should be horrified. Instead he felt a little headache – just to the left of his left eye and about half an inch above his eyebrow, maybe an inch in which was a completely different headache from the all-over dull burn that the Trials had left – and relief that he hadn’t had to try to walk over to the dresser. Whatever. Hell-bound, he reminded himself. Avoiding minor conveniences wasn’t exactly going to buy him a better seat.

He checked. Cas had called ten times after Gilliel had poofed the phone back to the room. Then there was a text from Dean. SRY SAM TOOK HIS PHON AWY. Sam shook his head. Dean was a bright guy. Maybe he hadn’t finished high school but he was well read in three languages, two of which were even living, and he had the smarts to hunt as well as anyone Sam had ever met. His fingers were capable of some of the most intricate and delicate wiring tasks that the younger Winchester had ever seen. Why, then, did all of his texts look like they’d been typed by a monkey with a brick? There was a text from Kevin as well, from later in the evening. “Water guns worked. Thanks.”

Gilliel returned. She was not alone. Artemis’ twin was with her. The angel carried a lap tray with toast, coffee and fruit. Apollo carried a glass of wine – what else? “Hi, Sam,” the latter greeted as the former settled the desk over Sam’s lap. “Gilliel tells me you’re feeling a little under the weather today.”

Sam chuckled. “Under the weather” was an interesting way of putting it, like a burst of hail in the middle of a blizzard. “Maybe a bit,” he admitted. “I’ve been worse.”

“I’m sure. “ He placed the glass on the table. How would wine taste with coffee? Sam’s palate wasn’t exactly refined at the best of times. “This should help with your fever. “

He’d thought it was wine. “What is it?”

“Wine,” the sun god replied. “With additives.”

“What kind of additives?”

“Herbs. Most of them are commonplace.” He rattled off a list. Almost all of them were familiar to Sam. Some of them were not. “Some of them we brought from Olympus. You won’t find them in many places outside this little hill.”

“Are any of them addictive?”

“No.” The corners of his mouth twitched, trying to restrain a laugh. Of course he was laughing. Sam's mistakes were probably hilarious to the people who didn't have to live with them.

“Are any of them toxic?”

“Not to you. Your brother would be advised not to use them too often, but your unique physiology makes them safe enough for you.”

Well, that was interesting. “Are any of them mind altering in any way?”

“They’ll take away some of the pain that you’re feeling, which is affecting your mood. So in that sense yes, they are mind-altering drugs. Other than that no. You will not hallucinate, you will not slip into an altered state, you will not get high. You’ll just feel a bit better.”

“Is the use of them considered immoral in any way by any culture?”

“There are some religions that consider use of any kind of medicine to be against God,” Gilliel answered, “but since it is being given to you by a god the point is either invalid by virtue of his divinity or moot because of his pagan nature. One of the herbs was incorrectly thought to cause an unseemly rise in libido by a small tribe that inhabited the part of Scotland from which your mother’s family hails before even the Picts arrived.” Sam almost choked on that, eliciting a chuckle from both beings. “As I said, their supposition was incorrect. They also believed that bathing caused illness and that having long hair led to demonic possession.”

He sighed. “Sorry. I just had to be sure.” He hesitated and then drank from the glass. He hadn’t thought he’d be a big fan of herbed wine or whatever, but it was at least palatable. “Thanks.”

“It should take a little while to really take effect.” He grinned. “I’ll let you rest. See you at dinner.” He left.

Gilliel sat on the end of the bed. “Did you enjoy last night’s party, Sam?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Yeah, you know what? I did. It was kind of fun to be around people like that and not have to fight them, you know?”

“I do know. I thoroughly enjoyed myself as well.” She gave a contented smile and sigh. “I miss my family, Sam. I do. I even miss the way things used to be in Heaven, when Michael was in charge.” He tried not to flinch at the name. Michael had been a very different angel before being dragged into the Cage. Before Sam had dragged him into the Cage. “At the same time, it seems like there’s a lot that I’ve missed out on. I can see why Gabriel chose to stay among the pagans.” Her smile lit up the room. “I went hiking with Dionysus and Ariadne this morning. We watched the sun rise over Napa Valley. It was magnificent. I have you to thank, Sam.” “Me?” He blinked. “I was mostly snoring.” “You were not snoring. You were sleeping peacefully. But if it were not for you, if you had not permitted me to stay with you, I would not have experienced this.” She leaned in and kissed him on the top of his head. He’d never experienced a stranger gesture before. He’d seen it in others. Their mother had kissed Dean’s head when they’d visited his memory of her in Heaven. He kept his composure as she smiled down at him. “Do you need anything?”

“Uh, yeah. Those texts Saraswati gave me last night and my laptop if you wouldn’t mind. I might as well be useful while I wait for the drugs to kick in.” He forced a thin grin. The angel brought the requested items to him. “She seems kind.”

“Yeah. Yeah, she seems really nice. Helpful, you know? We’ll see if this tablet or whatever turns up any leads.” He tried some of the toast. He stopped trying the toast. Gilliel left. Sam was alone with the texts and his laptop.

When he’d looked at the bronze tablet last night he’d successfully identified the language as Sanskrit and that had been about the extent of his capability. Now as he looked at it he found he could understand it. He could understand it as easily as he could understand English or Latin or Enochian. The engraving was old and worn. It was difficult to look at for long and there were places where he actually had to hold it up to the laptop screen to get light into the right places to see what the letters were supposed to be, but he’d worked with worse. Slowly a translation began to take shape. Most of the text was pretty metaphysical. Maybe it would have been interesting years ago, when he was struggling to get all that rage under control. Maybe not – sometimes his blood boiled just because of the blood itself. (Chugging more of the stuff down hadn’t helped.) About two paragraphs in, though, it started to get interesting. The author switched from trying to achieve personal enlightenment or whatever to talking about a particular hero going to see a god in his home. The hero needed to sneak into the god’s home, which was actually on another plane of existence. There was a series of steps that needed to be taken – not like trials or Trials, but there was a ritual “like that found among the people to the west who write on clay,” and it had to be done someplace where the “curtain is thin,” and so on and so forth. It wouldn’t be easy, but it looked like it would be possible to back-door it into Heaven. There was a way, anyway. Who was going to do it was another matter – living people couldn’t exactly run wild up there. After an hour he put the translation aside for a moment. He hadn’t done his daily parole check-in yet and after Gilliel had hung up on Cas last night he kind of felt like he should get on with it.

“Sammy!” his brother greeted, and he could hear the relief in Dean’s voice. “How you feeling?”

“A little better, I guess. I got a decent night’s sleep so that’s something. How’s everything back in Kansas?” He tried the toast again. He stopped trying the toast again. The drugged wine stayed down at least. So did the coffee.

“Not too bad. Sorry about Cas harassing you last night. I know it was kind of a dick move. He’s just frustrated. You know.”

“Yeah. I can be kind of obsessive myself. What did you all get up to last night?”

“The usual. You know, Kevin’s getting to be a pretty good shot. I think it’s all that practice with the water pistols.”

Sam kept a straight face. His brother could hear a smirk from a thousand miles away. “I’m glad he got something out of his year on the lam, then. You’ve got him doing target practice, then?”

“Oh yeah. Well, you know, I’m going to be taking Cas out on hunts and he says he wants to come too.” He caught himself. “You know, the Impala is a big car, we can fit four people in it no problem. Kevin’s not a big guy.”

“It’s good that he wants to get out, do something more than look at the damn tablets.” Sam’s voice stayed perfectly steady and about as upbeat as it ever had been. That fact generated almost as much pride as his straight face during the water pistol comment. “Think he’s got it in him?” He already knew the answer, of course. He just didn’t need Dean knowing how badly he needed to change the subject.

“Are you kidding me?” his brother scoffed. “Kid’s a natural. I don’t think anything could faze him anymore. He’s got ice water in his veins. Ask Crowley. Smart as a whip, sassy as hell. Reminds me a hell of a lot of a young you, just a better shot.”

Great. Not only was he being replaced, the replacement was an upgrade. Of course he was an upgrade. The guy was an actual human, not just a reasonable facsimile thereof. Or an unreasonable facsimile thereof. “Glad to hear it,” he said after another gulp of the herbed wine. It was entirely medicinal. Yeah, that was it. Whatever, as long as his voice was steady. “You guys find anything in the library yesterday?” “Yeah, a handy little demonology from the fifteenth century that had Crowley alternately laughing and saying, ‘Huh. So that explains it. Dude can’t put it down. You’d think it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection or something. How was your little divine kegger?”

“Pretty good, actually. I met some interesting folks. Might have gotten some leads, we’ll have to see if anything comes of them.”

“Oh yeah? Already? Well good on you, Sammy.” Light shone through his the whiskey-soaked voice across the miles. “Does that mean you’re coming home now?”

He chuckled. “Dude, no. I just got here like yesterday. It’s nice though. I see why you’re so into the memory foam thing.”

“I know, right? It remembers me, Sammy. I’m telling you, it’s incredible. I’m trying to get Cas to let me pick him up one but he keeps saying no. I don’t know what’s wrong with the guy.”

It didn’t take rocket science to explain it. The guy had been duped into betraying his entire species. Memory foam probably seemed like an unspeakably luxurious allowance to him. Either that or there was already a memory foam mattress he was hoping to use and he was just waiting until Sam was out of the way to go for it. “It’s not for everybody, Dean.” Who was he kidding? Cas wouldn’t wait. Not for Sam’s departure.

“Yeah, well, I don’t get it. How’s the wine?”

“Incredible. I wasn’t ever much of a wine guy but I’ve got to say, we’ve been missing out. Listen, is Kevin around?”

“Sure thing.” Dean bellowed for the prophet, and within moments the phone got passed off. “Hey Sam, how’s things?”

“Thing-ish. Nice job with the water guns. I hear your aim is impressive.”

“It’s a gift, what can I say, my man?” “Listen, did you ever find that Babylonian tablet I asked you to dig up for me?”

“Oh yeah. Scanning it was a challenge. I went out and got one of those wand scanner thingies, I’m sending it now.” After half a second his in box lit up. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. That database we built is pretty searchable, right?”

“Sam, we didn’t build it. You built it. Yourself. I didn’t even make suggestions.”

Okay, that was true. “You know how to maintain it and everything though. I showed you. It’s important, Kevin. It’s not like Cas can do this crap.”

There was an exhalation. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

“Charlie will probably be able to figure it out, but it really needs to be someone resident at the bunker. We can’t have it accessible off-site.”

“That’s not the problem, Sam.” His voice was lower, gruffer. “I know. It’s important. Let’s just… What do you need? Another tablet?”

“Yeah. Do a search for things from the general Mesopotamian area – I’m thinking Sumerian, could be Akkadian. There should be a ritual that involves breaking and entering into a god’s abode. I’m thinking maybe a fertility god? Or a sky god? I’m kind of guessing there. Text me when you’ve got something.”

“Are you serious? What brought this on?”

“Got a lead last night. I’m still working on a translation. I’ll upload it when I get back, but it refers to something from ‘the people to the west who write on clay.’ I figure Mesopotamia was a good place to start.” A cough rattled his chest but it was dry.

“Who gave you the lead?” Kevin sipped from something. Sam hoped it was coffee and that the youth wasn’t picking up Dean’s bad habits. Or Crowley’s bad habits.

“You probably don’t want to –“ He cut himself off. There was no reason to treat Kevin like a concussed bunny. He didn’t need to be sheltered, especially not if he was going to take up hunting with Dean. “Saraswati.”

“You picking up Indian chicks in bars?”

“No, Kevin, I mean as in the goddess of scholars. She’s a nice lady. Very classy. If you’re going to start hunting with Dean and Cas, you should be aware of what you’re getting into.” He could just about hear the gaping-fish look on Kevin’s face. His chuckle was purely involuntary. “Our hunts haven’t been normal since I left college.”

“You went to college?”

“Three and a half years at Stanford, man. I only left because…” He took a deep breath and let it go. “Look, Dean and I grew up in the life. Doesn’t mean I didn’t want out, but when we tell you that it’s not an option? It’s because we know. We’ve both tried, Kevin. It finds you. I ran off and stayed away for three and a half years and I had no contact with my dad, almost no contact with Dean. Dean only came and found me when Dad disappeared and that’s when I got pulled back in but you know what? I’d have been pulled back in anyway. There was stuff brewing that would have dragged me back kicking and screaming one way or another. Mostly screaming. If Dean hadn’t been there, if Dean hadn’t been involved, the whole thing would have turned out very differently, you understand what I’m saying?”

“Not really. It sounds scary. But it sounds like the gist of what you’re trying to convey, without telling me things that will turn my hair white before I’m twenty, is that I should stick by Dean and listen to him when he tells me not to do things.”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you, Kevin. You’re a smart guy.”

“I know. Advanced placement, remember?” His grin was audible too, just as much as the fish face. “So the goddess of scholarship gave you a lead, huh?”

“Yeah. Let’s see where it goes.”

“We can do that. I’ll let you know when I get something we can use. Hey, listen. Castiel is getting impatient.” Great. “Sam, it’s Cas.”

“Yeah, Cas.” Because he couldn’t have figured that out from Kevin’s warning. Because he couldn’t have figured that out from Cas’ voice. Because apparently being subhuman made him too stupid to engage his brain cells. “What’s going on?”

“I wanted to remind you that we still have a lot of work to do –

“ “I’m aware, Cas. We actually got a lead at the party last night, I’m working to see where it goes right now.” 

“Oh.” Absolute silence from the other end. Well, not absolute silence. Kevin’s sniggering could be heard if he tried hard enough. “My apologies, Sam. I did not mean to imply –“

“It’s okay, Cas. Really.” Of course he’d meant to imply that Sam had been neglectful. Why would he not? He’d been opposed to Sam’s trip here from the very start. “I don’t know if it will go anywhere, but it’s a start. How are you holding up?”

“Well enough. I’m enjoying target practice. It’s strange. I’ve been a warrior for eons and I’m finding that I need to re-learn so many things, but at the same time I’m finding that this body remembers more than I expected it to. It is stronger than it was when it was Jimmy’s, more agile.”

“Well, you’ve been living a different life in it than you were when it was his. More athletic. Jimmy sold advertising on AM radio. You fought angels and demons and Leviathan and g- and who knows what else. You have to expect some changes. It’s good, though. Is Dean giving you a good workout regimen? Keeping you in shape?” He should really know these things already. It wasn’t like they hadn’t been living right on top of each other, but he’d been spending most of his time with his head in a book or asleep.

“Well, maybe. I mean, we’ve been training.”

“Start running. Every morning, I’d say. Your body’s probably what, late thirties now? If you’re going to start hunting you’re going to be eating a lot of road food. That stuff is so not healthy. You need to pay attention to your heart health. That stuff can slow you down, make it harder for you to recover from injuries. You’re in fine shape now, and everything, but you want to keep it that way.”

“You don’t run.”

“I can barely walk, Cas. Believe me, if I could go for a run I would.”

“Where is Gilliel?” “She went back downstairs with Apollo. I think they were discussing medicine. I think she’s having a good time, Cas. She went for a sunrise hike with Dionysus and Ariadne this morning, said it was an amazing experience.” He grinned. 

“Are you corrupting my sister, Sam?”

Of course he was. Being in his mere presence was corruption. Look how far Cas had fallen just from secondhand exposure. “She’s making her own choices, Cas. I’m staying out of it. Is it really such a horrible thing for her to have a good time?”

“Angels are unused to hedonism, Sam. And we were not meant to consort with pagans.”

“Gabriel did just fine,” the hunter shot back. “He might have died, but he died a hero. And for all that he was in love with a pagan, he died an Archangel, capital letters and all. And Balthazar seems to have done just fine with hedonism.” Cas went silent and Sam bit his tongue. He shouldn’t have said anything. Cas had enough guilt, he didn’t need Sam piling it on. There was that temper of his, and let’s spin the Wheel of Causality to see where that little outburst came from! Was it the demon blood? Was it John Winchester’s oh-so-stellar legacy? Maybe the remnants of the Cage, because that had done wonders for his anger management. Or maybe the fever. Or maybe it was just him, because he was at heart an asshole.

“Crowley wants to say hello,” Cas said now, and the phone got moved again. “Sam,” the more-or-less cured demon greeted warmly. “Warmly” had a whole different meaning when it came to a mostly-former demon. “How was your evening? Was it as wild and crazy as I imagined?”

“Probably not.” Sam forced a light tone. “Your imagination is, er, vast.”

“Oh, Sam, you have no idea. No idea at all. Did you enjoy yourself and look at something besides that bloody laptop for a minute or two at least?”

“Yeah, yeah I did. It was a little weird to be at a party full of supernatural beings and not fighting anyone but yeah, it was nice. How are things there?”

“Good. Always entertaining. Kevin blasted the two lovebirds with a squirt gun yesterday. Repeatedly. Good times. And you wouldn’t believe the book Squirrel found me in the library. Endless hours of entertainment. Apparently some medieval demonologists got very imaginative when it came to your old demon-daddy Azazel.”

“Can you maybe never refer to him like that again? As in for all time?”

“If you like. Some of those clerical types were very sick men. I’m pretty sure you caught up to the author of this particular volume after he got downstairs though. Should I be listening to your brother with regards to dear little Castiel’s diet? I’m a little concerned about all of the bacon that Squirrel seems to feel is essential.”

“I’m hardly an nutritional expert, Crowley. I can barely boil an egg.”

“You’re a health expert. I’ve seen what you eat. Remember, I’ve always known who I’m dealing with.”

The guy had a point. “Yeah. Right. Uh, no one needs to eat as much bacon as Dean thinks they do, especially without an angel to deal with the consequences. They both need more dark leafy green stuff. And, uh, almonds I guess. Fiber. Stuff like that.” He shook his head. “Just be prepared for all the bitching and moaning.”

“I was the king of Hell, darling. No one has heard more bitching and moaning than I have. I’ll make sure that the regimen around here improves. Let me give you back to big brother.”

“Heya Sammy,” Dean greeted. “Still upright?”

I haven’t gotten out of bed all day, he thought. “Yeah. I think I hurt Cas though, man. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well. He’s kind of touchy right now. You probably shouldn’t have brought up Balthazar. Then again, he doesn’t need to be the guardian of Gilliel’s morals either, so I guess he left himself open for that.”

“You heard that.” Of course he heard that. Cas had no problem materializing two inches away from the guy when he had angelic powers; he wouldn’t feel compelled to leave the room to have a conversation with the guy’s brother. Even if the conversation was negative.

“Well, yeah. Don’t listen to him, Sammy. Gilliel has free will, just like he does. Just like he did. Got it?”

He smiled then. “Got it, Dean. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Yeah, I’ll catch you later. Crowley was muttering something about something that wasn’t burgers for dinner. My burgers are awesome. I’ve gotta put a stop to this before it gets out of hand.”

Sam shook his head and hung up. He could stare at the ceiling and contemplate Cas’ issues with him for weeks if he wanted to. Hell, he had. It wouldn’t resolve them and it wouldn’t solve any of their other issues. He had a goal. He had several goals. Goals were good. He could work with goals. Kevin had scanned the tablet he wanted. It was a weird one to be sure. Half of it was written in Elamite and half in Canaanite, and that was weird enough. Fortunately Sam was good on both counts.

If Persephone had just been cursed then her curse would probably have been lifted with Zeus’ death. (And where, precisely, did Olympians go when they died?) On the other hand, the former king of the Greek pantheon might well have bound the goddess to his brother, and that would be a little more complicated to deal with. Fortunately he’d remembered a mention of such a thing in the archives. How it had come to be in the bunker was a complete mystery. He had a mental image of some great-great-grandfather prancing around Mesopotamia somewhere dressed like Indiana Jones, looting artifacts like there was no tomorrow. Not that that was anything to be proud of, really. It was a lot like Bella Talbot dressed up in a suit made of colonialism. But hey, it had gotten what he needed right now to someplace where he needed it to be so he wasn’t going to complain too loudly. He started translating.

By the time the first text came in two more hours had passed. It wasn’t from Kevin. His phone helpfully identified the sender as Saraswati. “Enjoying the texts, Sam?” How had she gotten his number? He could have smacked himself in the head before he even finished the thought. She’d put the books up here after Gilliel had gotten rid of the phone. How hard was this? His brother had definitely gotten a defective divine being. Celestial being. Whatever.

“ Very much, thank you.”

“ Don’neglect the Farsi one,” she advised. &ldquo:I marked the passage most relevant to you.”

“ I will,” he replied. Right now, though, he was caught up in the Elamite or Canaanite or whatever thing. According to this tablet it might be possible to break that binding if they could just figure out the right process. Artemis’ cooperation would be key because she had the weapons that would be most useful in getting blood out of Hades. Of course it would need to be a blood ritual. It was always a blood ritual. He supposed it could be worse. There were so many other bodily fluids that could be used, and he really didn’t want to be involved with collecting any of them. Or thinking about them.

The next text was from Kevin about an hour later. “62 results,” he said. “You’ve got to narrow down the search terms.”

“Add the words ‘curtain’ or ‘veil,’” he instructed after a moment’s contemplation.

“Will do.” Kevin followed up with, “I just nailed Dean in the mouth with the squirt gun.”

“Run,” Sam advised.

Dinner would probably be soon, although he wasn’t sure about the hours kept around here. He should probably be vaguely clean if he were planning to show up. Yeah, Cas was definitely the defective angel. Gilliel didn’t come into the room to fetch him until he was washed and dried and dressed. She gave him a smile. “Have you enjoyed your day, Sam?” 

“It’s been productive,” he admitted. “You should call your brother. He’s concerned for your morals.”

She blinked. “I hardly think that he’s in a position to judge my morality, all things considered.”

“I pointed that out to him. It didn’t go well.” He tossed her his phone. “I’ll give you some privacy.”

“No need.” She dialed the former angel’s number from his history and switched to her native language. “Good evening brother. How are you? No, Sam suggested that I call you. Are you well? Excellent. Yes, I went hiking with – of course they’re gods, Castiel. What did you think they were, starfish?” Sam choked back a laugh. “They’re very pleasant companions. After lunch we went horseback riding with some wood nymphs. I’ve only just come back from a hunt with Artemis, Apollo and three of the centaurs. It was splendid. We’ll consume the rabbits tomorrow.” Well that would be interesting. Too bad Sam wouldn’t be able to appreciate it. “Cavorting? Really, Castiel? You’re hardly in a position to complain, you were ‘cavorting’ with the King of Hell!” There was a pause. “No, it isn’t any business of yours. Or anyone else’s. Oh, for crying out loud, Castiel, would you listen to yourself? You spend your days making sad little doe eyes at his brother across that bunker and you are worried about his morals? He is fine, I am fine, he is working when he should be resting and enjoying himself – no, shut up. I begin to think you’ve been spending too much time among the humans. You have absorbed their asinine gender roles into your thought processes – have you forgotten that we are genderless, Castiel?” Sam grimaced. Was Cas really going there? Seriously? “My decisions are mine to make. Not yours. I appreciate your concern but you are seriously out of line. Good night, Castiel.” She hung up the phone and smiled at Sam. “Is that better?”

“Impressive,” he nodded. “I’m sorry to cause problems between you and Cas.” He’d meant to help by encouraging discussion, but he’d only made things worse. Poison.

“You caused nothing, Sam. If anything, he helped to provide the opportunity for us all to have free will. He has no one to blame but himself. And of course as a human he has no moral leg to stand on. Come on, let’s go downstairs.” He grabbed his laptop and the bed tray and followed.

Why the gods were bothering with a dinner he didn’t know. They probably didn’t need to eat, did they? Or if they did, didn’t they eat something different? Ambrosia or something like that? And not the gross thing with the marshmallows. Everyone else was already sitting down, though, so he took the seat that was available to him and accepted the greetings that came his way. It was just the six of them tonight as well as whatever maenad was serving dinner. That kept Sam’s nerves in a much better state. He asked them about their hunting trip, their horseback riding adventure. “Have you gone riding, Sam?” Ariadne wanted to know.

“Once, a very long time ago. It wasn’t an experience I’d care to repeat. I don’t think the horse cared for it much either,” he added ruefully, remembering the time they’d time travelled back to visit Samuel Colt. “She wasn’t exactly built to handle…”

“Were your feet dragging on the ground, Sam?” Dionysus teased.

“Pretty much,” he admitted, and he had to admit that it was kind of funny. It hadn’t been very funny then, certainly not when he’d had to deal with being all saddle-sore for a week besides, but now it just seemed ridiculous. “It was the only one available, and we’d gone back in time so it’s not like I could just steal a car, and it was just a mess all around.” 

“Is time travel common for you?” Apollo wanted to know.

“Not if I can avoid it.” He shuddered. There was just something icky about meeting your parents before they were your parents, especially parents you never actually knew. “Dean’s done more of it than I have. I find it kind of creepy, myself. I think he kind of likes it. He likes the outfits. You should have seen him that time we got stuck LARPing, he couldn’t wait to play dress-up.” Well, that just led to more storytelling. Apparently gods had some fundamental difficulties with the concept of LARPing. That was fine, so did Sam. They all liked the idea of Dean as the Queen of Moondor’s handmaiden though, and when Sam was able to produce photographic evidence he thought the laughter must be echoing through the entire valley. After dinner – a dinner Sam managed to actually choke down about a quarter of, which was impressive for him – the party adjourned to the patio again. The sun was setting and beautiful in the distance. Sam produced his laptop and cleared his throat, which naturally turned into a coughing fit because why would anything be dignified or even just not disgusting? When the spasm cleared he sipped from the ubiquitous wine. “So, if Persephone was just cursed her problem should be solved and she should be able to stay wherever she wants come October. If your father actually bound her to Hades, though, you’re going to need something a little more intense to free her. Do you happen to know or remember what he actually did?” 

They exchanged glances. “Not off the top of our heads,” Apollo admitted. “I think there was blood involved though.”

“So it was a binding. Okay. I did find a relevant tablet in our archives a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t relevant to our needs so I didn’t think much of it but I remembered it after talking to you, so I asked Kevin to scan it and email it to me and this is what I came up with.” He turned the screen so they could see it. 

Ariadne frowned. “Shouldn’t you have been sleeping?”

“It… It looks reasonable,” Dionysus mused. “I think we’ll want to change a couple of the components. We’re not talking about Elamite or Canaanite gods here, we’re talking about our own kind. Where did you find this?”

“The Men of Letters collected information,” Gilliel supplied. 

“Collect,” Artemis corrected. “They collect information.” Sam’s guardians exchanged glances even he couldn’t read.

“Sorry,” the angel said then. “Your sister is correct. They collect information, all kinds of information. Information about anything supernatural – deities, creatures, spellwork. It does not matter. Sam, along with the young prophet Kevin, has been attempting to codify and organize the information they have. They’ve also been translating what they have to make it more accessible to those who haven’t had their unique educations.” “Unique education.” That was one way to describe having Lucifer steal your brain.

“And you took the time to work on Persephone’s problem?” Golden curls tilted to the side. “Don’t you have enough going on with the angels and with Hell?”

“It took two hours,” he said. “I’ve got two hours. Give me an email address and I’ll send it to you.” 

The gods looked at each other in confusion. “I can’t understand why you’d do this for us, Sam,” Dionysus told him, “but thank you.”

“No problem. When you figure out how you want to change the ritual or whatever, give Dean a call. I’ll make sure he’s willing to help.” It would take them time to figure out how to tweak the spell and he’d probably be out of commission if he were even still around. But he didn’t need to talk about that. For now, it was enough to know that he’d done something to help.


	8. Chapter 8

Sam spent two more days and two more nights at the winery. He tried not to spend his days in the bed. Memory foam was fantastic. Sunshine and Napa air was even better, and he wanted the chance to enjoy both as much as he possibly could. Between Gilliel’s angelic mojo and Apollo’s herbal concoctions he was pretty well able to amble downstairs by himself. Maybe sunrise hikes and horseback rides were a bit beyond him. He could still translate and read and work and converse.

His initial intentions were strongly on the side of “translate” and “work.” It was what he had promised his family he’d do, Dean and Cas and Kevin, and it was what he wanted to get done before he died. It was what he was still good for, after all. When he tried to combine those two activities with the sunshine and Napa air, however, he found that conversation became a more common activity than he’d ever expected. What was more, he found he didn’t mind. He’d never been the most extroverted of people. Growing up in Dean’s overwhelming presence had helped him become shy. Growing up as a supernatural being in a family of hunters – and he’d suspected at least some of it long before any actual powers or whatever showed up – had done the rest, because the last thing a monster wanted to do when surrounded by hunters was to draw attention to himself.

Here, though, there were no humans. No full humans, anyway. Sam himself was the closest thing to it, and no one felt the need to hide anything. For crying out loud, up here there were actual centaurs running around. They couldn’t hide anything. Everyone knew that he wasn’t human, because he wouldn’t have been there if he were. So he wasn’t as panicked as he might have been the day after he handed over his translation when he found himself asked about it. 

He’d been sitting at a table on the patio, peacefully working on the bronze tablet and enjoying a view of the valley. There may or may not have been wine involved. He was alone although that didn’t last. A cluster of three maenads, two nymphs and a centaur joined him without invitation. He didn’t really mind much. They seemed friendly enough. He just knew their names, or at least some of them. The nymph, he knew, was Daphne. The maenads were… Xenobia… right? And … uh… Melania? And a third whose name he could not for the life remember, but with her curly red hair and green eyes he could only call her Merida in his head. The centaur’s name was Bob, and who seriously named their centaur baby Bob? “All work and no play makes Sam a dull boy,” Melania pointed out, putting a hand on his right forearm.

He did not flinch. He did pull away as soon as politeness allowed. “You sound like my brother,” he told her with a little grin to let her know it wasn’t meant harshly.

“Is your brother like you?” Merida wanted to know, and damn if she didn’t have the accent too. No wonder he would never remember her actual name. 

“Depends on how you mean. Not in most ways. We’re both hunters, I guess.”

The whole assemblage laughed. “Hunters. Right. How can you hunt us when you’re…” Daphne trailed off, a hand on his left shoulder. “What exactly are you, anyway?”

“I’d rather not hunt you. I’d rather not hunt period, but if people are being harmed I do what I have to. Did, anyway. And I’m… well, I’m an abomination.” It was the only word that he could think of and it still hurt. It just didn’t hurt as much as it once did, or maybe as much as it did outside of this place. For crying out loud he was talking to a guy with the bottom half of a horse, and a woman who turned into a tree.

They processed that information. “You don’t look very abominable to me,” commented Xenobia. He supposed that the TB look was in this year.

“It’s what the angels call us. Called us. We started out as humans, like you.” He indicated the maenads. “A demon decided to experiment with human infants and created us. I’m the only one left now.” As he spoke he felt unspeakably lighter. Not lighter as in the sense that he needed to go out and buy smaller-sized jeans, a sensation with which he was entirely too familiar these days. Lighter in the sense that he could actually speak about it. He’d never spoken about his unique DNA before, not to anyone. He’d explained to some of Azazel’s other children, but he hadn’t had all of the information then and they hadn’t known about hunting either. The closest would have been Andy Gallagher. (He still missed Andy, after all these years.)

“So… doesn’t that make the other hunters a little… I mean…” Bob frowned. “Okay. Doesn’t that make you… part demon or something?”

“I’d guess somewhere between an eighth and a quarter,” he assented.

“Don’t the other hunters… I mean… no offense, man, but I’ve met a few hunters and they’re not usually the most open-minded of guys. I knew this one, Gordon Walker –“ 

“How did you run afoul of Gordon? I thought he only went after vampires!” He chuckled.

“I was going after vampires myself that day, but Gordon was not interested in collaborating.” He grimaced. “Someone should do something about him one of these days.”

“Someone did.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. So in answer to your question yeah, other hunters and I don’t get along really well all the time. Gordon found out about the whole not-fully-human thing and started hunting me, got a lot of people on his side. Then I made some mistakes, started the Apocalypse by accident, that got more people on my case. I try not to draw attention to myself.”

“And Gordon?” “He got turned by a vampire a few years ago, decided it was his big break to finally take me.” 

“Oh?”

“He was wrong.”

“You took his head?”

“Yeah.”

There was silence for a moment. “Well hell, man, I owe you a drink. Or three.” Bob patted him on the back “gently,” leading to a violent coughing spasm. “But do you still have problems with that? I mean, that was ages ago. And you stopped it too, didn’t you?”

“Doesn’t matter. Although I guess it’s been a while since I’ve been shot.” He grinned at the looks on the faces of his companions. “I got over it.” Mostly. There was a reason he wasn’t so broken up about going back to Hell, after all. “So you all actually hunt too, huh?”

“I guess,” Daphne shrugged. “We don’t really think of it that way, though.”

“We fight for our gods,” Melania explained. “We serve them. Bob was after the vampires because Dionysus needed him to be, not because he has a particular problem with vampires or because he is particularly keen to hunt supernatural creatures. The rest of the time we hang out here. Do our thing.”

“And what’s your thing, exactly?” The nymph and the maenads could pas as human, could do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t as though Bob could just pop into town and go to the movies.

Xenovia shrugged. “We work. We work the land, we work in the winery. We research.” She winked at him. “We enjoy ourselves in whatever way we can. We train, of course. What do you do for fun?”

“We don’t exactly get a lot of down time,” he admitted. There was no way in hell he was going to admit that he’d gotten dragged along to a LARP. In fact, the only good thing about the Trials eating him alive from the inside out was the fact that he’d been excused from the stupid Moondor Jubilee or whatever. “Play pool or poker, I guess.”

Merida’s eyes lit up. “Poker?”

“With the clothes on,” Daphne frowned at her. The redhead slumped but produced a deck of cards anyway. Dean liked to denigrate Sam’s card-playing ability, but he frankly owed his life to Sam’s poker face and that was one thing that had only gotten better since the Cage. He won handily, although he was careful not to make anyone feel humiliated, and where the hell did Bob even keep a wallet anyway?

Maybe Sam’s translation work didn’t get as far as he’d have liked when he set out for California. That was okay. He even made a point of reading from the other text Saraswati had given him. That one turned out to be a copy of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. He was pretty sure he’d seen a translation or something in the bunker library, although obviously the original was better than a translation. And based on the paper and the script, this one might be a very early copy. The passage she’d marked for him was within a section about a hero called Rostam. The gist of the section she’d marked was that Rostam’s mother, Rudabeh, was the daughter of a king whose grandfather had been a demon. The son she bore – Rostam, who apparently took up more than half of the book and was presented as the greatest hero in the history of time – obviously also had demon blood in his veins. It wasn’t as though the “colorful” ancestry hadn’t been an issue. Rostam’s paternal grandfather had felt a lot of trepidation about allowing his son (who had apparently been raised by birds, what was up with that? Was it an allusion to angels?) to marry someone with demonic ancestry, but the priests had insisted that the greatest hero for Persia would be born from the union. Interesting. Very interesting.

Maybe he was the only abomination left, but Azazel hadn’t been as creative as he’d thought. Of course, the mechanism had been very different.

The days passed far too quickly, and in addition to the general pain and fatigue of his illness Sam found a new ache: the muscles in his cheeks ached from unaccustomed smiling. He’d had fun. They left for the bunker after dinner on the third day and Sam was surprised to find that he didn’t want to leave. His hosts seemed downright sorry to see him go, and the centaurs gave him a riotous sendoff that made Dionysus cringe. The nymphs and maenads were more sedate in their leave-taking but that was only to be expected, and “sedate” was a relative term anyway.

They didn’t call ahead to the bunker before materializing inside it. That would have been too easy and a lot less fun. Granted, getting a squirt gun full of holy water to the face wasn’t exactly enjoyable but the looks on the faces of the people in the war room was worth it. “Ease up on the caffeine there, Kevin,” he recommended as Artemis supported him. “I’m not a demon.”

“The place is warded against everything, you muttonheads,” Crowley drawled, rolling his eyes and sipping his Scotch as Dean and Cas returned to their seats. “Only those three could actually get in.”

“Sam needs his bed,” Gilliel insisted, taking his other side.

“No, no,” he insisted. “I want to get everything uploaded from California. I can get to bed after.”

“You can do that from your room,” Artemis insisted as Dean approached and wrapped him in a hug. Attack hug, Gilliel had called it.

“Dude. You been around horses?” he asked after sniffing.

“What the hell would I do with a horse?” he replied. He let the three mother hens hustle him off to his little cell. He found that some changes had indeed been made to his room. The sheets had been changed out as Crowley had threatened. The mattress had not been replaced, but someone (presumably Crowley) had added a memory foam roll to the top of it. It was a compromise. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry. Either way it was going to have to wait until tomorrow, because sleep was calling to him first and foremost. He wasn’t entirely sure how he managed to start the upload process from his laptop to the database but he knew he didn’t stay awake to see it finish. He collapsed into the bed and didn’t wake until the next afternoon.

He found that the entire population of the bunker awaited him when he stumbled into the map room. He blinked, and his cheeks flushed. Had he forgotten to put pants on? No, he was clad. “What?”

“You think we can back-door it into Heaven.” Dean’s hands were on his biceps. “Just like that.”

“Can I have some coffee before we start talking metaphysics in multiple dead languages?” he asked plaintively.

“Did you not think this information merited immediate attention?” Cas seethed.

“Castiel.” Gilliel’s voice was a cool breeze, calming and chilling at the same time. “You might want to think about what happened the last time you took action before thinking about the possible motivations of the person giving you your information, or the possible consequences of your actions.” Artemis had moved to stand beside Sam. 

“There’s no need to be nasty here people,” Dean soothed. “Let’s try to get through this. What do we know so far?”

“We know I need coffee,” Sam said. “And my laptop.”

“Demanding little thing, aren’t you?” Kevin snarked, fetching a cup of coffee from the kitchen. Sam’s fingers closed around the mug as Crowley went to get the laptop. “So some goddess just gave you a tablet. Just like that.”

“Pretty much. Taught me Sanskrit too, so I could read it.” 

“Huh. In return for...”

“Nothing.” 

“Damnit Sammy, no one just does something for nothing. Especially not gods.” Dean glanced at Artemis. “No offense.”

“Saraswati was impressed by what Sam did to stop the Apocalypse,” Artemis snapped. “We live here too. Is it such a bad thing for someone to show her gratitude?” She shook her head. “She wanted to help him. She gave him what she could.”

“Why didn’t she point him toward something that could heal him then?” Crowley demanded. “Helping the angels is all well and good, but it doesn’t directly benefit our favorite moose, does it?”

“She offered,” Gilliel pointed out. “She was aware of the time constraint and said he had to pick an area to focus on. He chose the angels.”

Dean opened his mouth to object. “So,” Sam said, opening up the laptop. “I didn’t want to make a big deal about it until I had more information because I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up over a wild goose chase, but yeah. I think it should be possible. The Sanskrit tablet told us what we needed to do. We need to get to a place where the veil is thin between the worlds. We already know a few of those. Then we need to perform a ritual. The ritual is like those performed someplace west of India where people wrote on clay. My money is probably on Iran or Mesopotamia but I need more data. Then we need to figure out who gets the happy fun task of going in and dealing with Metatron. Living humans can’t walk around at will in Heaven, remember? “Once that’s dealt with we need to figure out how to open the gates again. It might be as easy as reversing the spell Metatron cast – giving Cas his grace back, giving the cupid back her bow and…” How was he going to put this delicately? “That needs more research,” he decided in the end because he did not want to be thinking about nephilim creation. Whoever got stuck with that task – well, it wouldn’t be his problem anyway. He cleared his throat. “It might not even be that complex. Then again, who knows? There may be information upstairs that we can find that will give us the right knowledge. There may not be. I mean, Metatron wrote everything down, right? We can’t exactly trust what he put into writing. I think we might need to keep thinking outside the box on this one.”

“What do you mean by that?” Cas tilted his head to the side.

“Outside the whole Heaven/Hell paradigm. Heaven and Hell are just… alternate planes of existence, right?” His mind raced, looking for ways to explain what he was thinking to both Dean and Cas at the same time. “They’re immensely powerful planes of existence because of all of the souls bound up in them but they’re still just alternate planes of existence. Every culture that has a belief in an afterlife, in an abode of the gods or whatever, probably has one. The Greeks have the Olympian plane, Dis, whatever. Buddhists have their own version of Hell. The same is true of a lot of the ancient Mesopotamian and Levantine cultures, the ones that were subsumed into the whole Judeo-Christian thing eventually. I think that we should be able to find what we need if we keep looking outside traditional Judeo-Christianity.” 

The former angel blinked. “I… that seems blasphemous. We aren’t really even supposed to acknowledge the existence of other gods.”

“I had dinner with three of them last night,” Gilliel pointed out. “Gabriel became one. I think it’s okay.” She sighed. “I suspect that’s one of those restrictions that might have crept in after our Father left, Castiel. After all, if the other gods’ servants have no problem with each other, with other gods, why should our Father’s?” She glanced at Crowley. “You look unsurprised.”

“Sam is an intelligent man. It’s part of why we’ve always been so antagonistic toward each other. He was smart enough to be a real threat.” Sam blushed at the praise. “It makes sense, really. This can’t be the first time that it happened, and while I’ve never met Metatron I can’t say that I’d trust anything that he wrote down myself. It’s not like he wrote down that the trials would kill Sam even if he aborted.”

“Hey. Hey! Sam is not gonna die!” Dean objected.

Sam rolled his eyes, which set the room to spinning. “Anyway. I’m not saying that we should ignore the God tablets completely, I’m just saying that we should verify what we find and not get overly attached to them. I mean, let’s think about what we’ve noticed in Metatron’s work so far. He’s been keen to make sure that there were no archangels left, right?” Dean and Cas both nodded. “Why?”

“Because the archangels were the ones who could take him down,” Artemis asserted. 

“And he was careful to ascertain that I was far enough along on the trials that… I was pretty much incapacitated.” He glanced at Dean. “Why?”

“Because you’ve got the smarts to outwit him,” Crowley suggested.

“Because you can read and translate multiple sources,” Kevin added.

“Because you are a key,” Castiel suggested after a moment’s thought. “Possibly the only key.” Sam’s blood ran cold at the words, but other than a hard swallow he did not react visibly. It wasn’t like he didn’t know.

“Key to what?” Dean spat. Clearly he knew too. 

“The Cage,” Gilliel supplied. She’d gone pale. “It’s true. Sam is the only one who could unlock the Cage at this point.”

“No,” Kevin shook his head. “The last time it took, what, a hundred seals or something?”

“Sam closed the Cage the last time,” Cas added. “It’s true. He could, if he wished, unlock the cage and release the only two archangels left alive. The only ones who could probably deal with Metatron.”

“But I’m not going to,” he told them firmly. “We will find another way. So don’t even think that.”

“He’s thinking about it,” Kevin said darkly. 

“He can think about it all he wants,” the older scholar told him. “In fact, that’s good. He won’t be able to anticipate what we’re actually doing if he’s worried that I’m going to pop the top on …” He swallowed, unable to be glib about his tormentors. “Them,” he finished lamely. “Anyway. We need a plan. The first thing we need is the ritual and the location.”

“Stull Cemetery is closest,” Cas recommended.

Crowley gaped. “Wow. You really, just… wow. No. Not Stull.” 

“Not Stull,” Dean agreed.

“It is logical. It is closest,” the former angel insisted. “We cannot afford to waste time.” Of course Cas was thinking about time. He was human now. He was thinking of his own mortality, even if he didn’t realize it. The other angels were still angels; they were simply denied access to heaven.

“I’m thinking Maine,” Sam suggested. “Unless we find information to the contrary. I appreciate your point of view on the subject, Cas, but I don’t think Stull Cemetery is a great idea for anyone involved. It’s kind of moot anyway, because we’ll need the ritual and the components. I’ll get on that right away. I’ll need help of course.”

“I will assist you,” Cas told him.

“As will I.” Gilliel fixed her brother with a firm look.

“Me too,” Kevin told him.

“I’m not quite as helpful as these other blokes, but I’ll do what I can,” Crowley told them all.

“I’ll help Dean with the components,” Artemis suggested. “I’m not so much of a scholar.”

“All right. After we figure this out, we’ll need to find a team to go in and take out Metatron. Living humans can’t get into Heaven. Dead humans won’t be able to take on an angel with his power, so stop thinking what you’re thinking Dean.” He glared. “Angels can’t enter until we pull the lever again and I don’t know if other gods can enter.”

“Probably not,” the only goddess in residence admitted. “I have a few ideas though. “

“Let’s get started.” He grabbed the bronze tablet and got to work as the rest of them blinked.


	9. Chapter 9

What a difference a day makes, Sam thought as he settled into the new routine. He resigned himself to the fact that he would never see the light of day again. He told himself it was okay, and then he made it okay for him. He’d had his time away, he’d had his time in the sun. Now it was time to be useful. Between her angelic powers and Apollo’s powders Gilliel was able to keep him relatively stable and comfortable. He still had trouble breathing but it wasn’t as though he was gasping like a fish, not like on the night of the Great Fall. He ached horribly but that was nothing new and he managed to push through it. After all, some stupid angelic TB or whatever had nothing on the Cage. 

The combination of medications ensured that the fever never got bad enough to break his concentration or his ability to carry a thought and that was the important thing. He pored through the documents. He wasn’t able to get through more then ten straight hours of wakefulness in any given day during that first week but he made the most of every minute, digging through tablet after scroll after manuscript as though there were no tomorrow.

The worst part wasn’t the pain. It wasn’t the humiliation of the weakness, of needing two (admittedly celestial or divine) beings to take care of him since he couldn’t take care of himself. It wasn’t the fact that he knew he’d spend the rest of his limited time alive in a hole in the ground and if that wasn’t a stark reminder of the Cage he didn’t know what was. The worst was the scrutiny. There was no part of the day when eyes weren’t upon him. Green eyes followed him to every part of the bunker, even to the goddamn bathroom. Even to the shower. How was that not creepy? At least that had an element of affection and concern to it. Sure there was the whole “Sam was out of my sight for three days, how did he screw up?” aspect of it but there was also the “Is he still suicidal?” aspect of it too. While he knew Dean only cared because he had to, because he’d had “take care of Sammy” drummed into his head for thirty goddamn years, at least he cared. The blue eyes were worse. He’d read horror stories online about people with desk jobs, people whose supervisors actually timed their bathroom breaks. That was Cas, and he wasn’t sure if he was more disturbed by the fact that Cas really thought he was that likely to go off-target or that the former angel considered himself to be Sam’s supervisor. Or, he had to admit, the idea that Cas paid attention to his eliminatory functions which was really just gross.

For the first few days Cas said nothing about it. Getting chewed out for attacking Sam had muzzled him for a few days. By the third day, though, he’d had enough. Gilliel was out with Dean seeking a component for a ritual outlined in one of the texts they’d found and Artemis had gone somewhere, possibly back to see her family. “Is this task boring to you, Sam?” Cas finally asked. 

“What?” he replied, looking up from his computer. “What are you talking about, Cas?”

“You’ve been exchanging electronic messages with someone for two hours. I can hear the alerts on your laptop. You are not focused on your translations. You are not interested in helping to storm heaven and restore the angels to their rightful home, even in the limited capacity remaining to you.”

Kevin’s eyes widened. “Cas, you’re a dick. Who do you think that it is who got us our best lead?”

Sam sighed. “It’s okay, Kevin. Cas, I’m not just working to translate texts, all right? I’m also trying to help track down components, trying to find you help for when you actually go into Heaven – well, when someone goes into Heaven, trying to figure out what the next move could be. This does involve interaction with people who don’t live here at the bunker.”

“You should delegate that task to someone else. Kevin is a suitable candidate.”

Sam could keep his temper. He would not snap. Castiel was not responsible for his poor people skills. He’d spent most of his existence as a dick with wings, getting his head screwed with by Naomi. He was just looking to clean up his mess and Sam shouldn’t have higher expectations of him. Besides, what could he do? They’d taken all the weapons away. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind, Cas.” He turned off the sound on his computer.

Kevin frowned. “No. I’m not a suitable candidate. I’m not his social secretary.”

“Dean is the social one, not Sam. Sam will do the research until he is unable to do so.”

“Well who died and put you in charge, Angel?” Crowley sneered, approaching. “Last time I checked the lot of you were in this together.”

“Sam has a history of making bad decisions when it comes to interactions with other people,” Cas explained. “He cannot make such decisions unsupervised.” Sam sighed. He knew better than to think that he’d ever move past, well, his past.

“Excuse me?” the more-or-less former demon objected.

“The decision he made to trust the demon Ruby started the Apocalypse, if you’ll recall.” Sam rose, collecting his things.

“Wow, Cas,” Kevin said, sitting back. “I didn’t think it was possible but you’re even more of a dick as a human than you were as an angel.”

“Sit down, Sam,” Crowley’s voice was gentle. “Your grandfather entrusted the key to this place to you. That means that this facility is more yours than his. Castiel does not get to chase you out of your own home.”

“It’s his home too,” he said. “He’s family. And he’s right.”

“You never trusted Ruby. I’ve read all the books, Sam. All of them. You worked with her, sure. You learned from her – you learned quite a bit from her. You enjoyed her company. You also successfully convinced her to restrict her possession to someone whose soul had already departed her body, which was a remarkable accomplishment and I should know, and you had the forces of Heaven actively manipulating you into working with her.” Sam and Castiel started at that. “What, you thought we didn’t know about that, Castiel? We all knew, plus it’s right there in the books. I’d look it up if I were you, Sam. It might help with that little self-esteem problem you have.

“Whereas you, Castiel, actively and knowingly conspired with the King of Hell to crack open Purgatory. You deliberately caused irreparable harm to Sam here for no reason other than to distract Dean and then you declared yourself to be a replacement for God. You left the two people you harmed most to clean up your mess. Then after you got back you - oh, let’s see, got manipulated into betraying your entire species, again. And now you’re expecting those same two people to risk their lives –what’s left of them in Sam’s case – to clean up your bloody mess. 

“And he’s doing it, he’s doing it without complaint, and here you are acting like he owes you something. Like you’re somehow superior to him. Sam worked with Ruby, but he cleaned up a mess both Heaven and Hell wanted him to make. Forced him to make, really. And you think he still needs to pay for it? I’m sorry, Castiel, but I don’t believe that you really understand how this is supposed to work. 

“I also find it incredibly entertaining that you’ve waited to lecture Sam on his responsibilities until your sister was away from home,” Crowley continued.

Cas’ face was ablaze. “I will concede your point about my mistakes, but you misunderstand my position on Sam’s responsibilities. It is not simply Sam’s past behavior that makes him unsuited to activity that requires judgment. It is his nature. Sam is an abomination and as such –“

Now Sam did collect his things and retreat. He did not trust his temper and he no longer had the strength to back it. With the door closed though he could force himself to calm down. It was temporary. It was all temporary. Cas was adjusting to humanity, and as a human of course he was even more disgusted by Sam than he’d been as an angel. It was only natural, only right.

His gaze fell on the book Saraswati gave him. Rostam would have punched Castiel, or trampled him under the feet of his horse or something. He chuckled. He opened his laptop again. He had indeed been involved with chat messages before the blowout, specifically with Bob the Centaur and Daphne. “You disappeared,” Bob pointed out. “Everything ok?”

Nothing was okay, but nothing was any different. “Housemates,” he replied. “It got tense.”

“You’ve been back for a day,” Daphne objected.

“You should know better than to live with humans by now,” the centaur chided. “LOL.”

“The last abomination colony there was turned into the Hunger Games,” he told them. “I don’t care to repeat the experience.” And there it was again. Cold Oak had been just about the worst – well, okay, not the worst, maybe the second, no, the – well, maybe the fourth worst experience of his life and it had set up the misery that followed. It wasn’t something funny. It wasn’t something to be joked about. It wasn’t something that he’d ever talked about again, other than to object to having been resurrected. But with these guys – he could at least eke out a smirk, because they could at least sort of get it. Maybe he was a monster and maybe he was the only one of his kind left, but at least he had fellow monsters to talk to.

No. None of them were monsters. They weren’t human but they were people and they were good people at that. Same with all of the gods that he’d met during his California interlude. He’d met some terrible gods in his time, and some that definitely counted as monsters and he didn’t regret taking out any of the ones he’d killed, but he was glad to have met every one of the gods he’d met during the past week and he’d cheerfully defend every one of them if he had the strength. Even Kali. None of them fit the description of “monster,” even though some of them had certainly done some less-than-stellar things in their day and none of them were human.

None of them were monsters. Rostam hadn’t been a monster. Maybe, just maybe, Sam Winchester wasn’t a monster either.

He got back to work, secure in his little cell. He didn’t feel compelled to come out when dinner was ready but it wasn’t out of shame or despair. He was absorbed in a combination of his work and an online game of chess with Dionysus, and that was okay. He decided that he would go to sleep as he was.

When he woke up the next day he rebelled again. He checked in with the California crowd before he showered. Why shouldn’t he? Dionysus had made an ingenious move while Sam had been sleeping; he actually had to take a few minutes to think about how to respond in a way that wouldn’t go spectacularly awry. Bob had some questions about hunting a spectre – that was something he didn’t want to think about more than he had to. He answered the question as best he could, including multiple warnings about not actually handling anything he didn’t bring with him. Then and only then did he seek the shower, followed by coffee. 

They once again had a full house. Gilliel and Castiel were in the kitchen with Crowley and Kevin. Crowley gave him a huge smile and passed him a cup of coffee. Cas frowned and wouldn’t meet his eyes, fleeing when he entered the room. Kevin smirked and clapped him on the arm. It would have been the shoulder if he’d been able to reach. The angel looked up at him. “I am sorry about yesterday, Sam. “

“Hey, it’s not your fault,” he told her as her grace washed over him, picking him up. “He’s the one who ran off at the mouth. And it isn’t as though he said anything that isn’t true.”

“Oh, but he did. And he’s been made aware of it.” Her lips folded into a thin line. “Very firmly. Angels are not simply healers, you know.” 

He barked out half a laugh. “Don’t I know it. The thing is, he’s got a right to his opinion. If he believes that an abomination like me can’t be trusted, then that’s what he’s going to believe. It doesn’t matter what I say and it doesn’t matter what I do. What I can do is my thing, just where he isn’t keeping track of my bathroom breaks. Because that’s just creepy.”

“Castiel never did have a good sense of personal space.” Crowley shrugged. “I made you some vegetable soup, Sam. I know meat is a challenge for you these days. Whenever you’re ready for it.” He bustled off to wherever he felt compelled to bustle. 

The angel smiled gently at him. “You’re far too forgiving for your own good, Sam. Nevertheless, you won’t be left alone with him again.” 

He put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s really not a problem. Let’s just… let’s just go see what’s going on with everyone, and I’ll get back to work.” 

The pair walked quietly out to the library. They walked quietly enough that Dean and Artemis did not notice their arrival. Sam supposed that they could be forgiven; their conversation was very intense. “Look,” his brother was saying. “I really don’t see what the problem is. He doesn’t even need to know. Just put it in his soup or whatever, bam, he gets better.”

Well, that kind of narrowed down the subject of their conversation, or rather the object. Sam didn’t like being the object of much. “Dean, he’s a person. With free will. He gets to decide for himself what he’s willing to do for himself, what he’s willing to have done to him. Can’t you see that? His entire life has been about the lack of choice. You can’t just take another choice away from him like that.”

“I can if it means he gets to make all the choices he wants for the next gazillion years,” the older Winchester insisted.

“What the actual Hell?” Sam blurted, leaning on a chair. Gilliel’s face was impassive. Clearly she was aware of whatever was going on. “What’s going on here, Dean? Artemis?” 

“Never you mind, Sammy,” his brother replied, turning to look at him with shining eyes. “You just grab some books and go do something nerdy. I’ll take care of the heavy lifting.”

“The hell you say. What you were just talking about sounded a lot like something that I should really, really know about.” 

“You should.” The goddess rose. “In fact, it’s essential because there is no way that I’m going to be a part of it without your involvement and Dean can’t pull it off without my cooperation.” She gave his brother a smirk. “Sometimes it’s good to be divine.” She walked over to him. “I think we’ve figured out a way to cure your Trials-related illness, Sam.”

“But…” he prompted when no one said anything.

“But nothing that has been said before has changed,” Gilliel confirmed. “Your body as it is now is mortal. It cannot accommodate the power required to shutter an entire plane of existence. Containing an Archangel’s grace is one thing. What you hold now is something else entirely.”

“I’m aware,” he said, wishing they’d get on with it. “What’s the catch?”

“Why does there have to be a catch?” Dean wanted to know. “Why do you always think there’s a catch?”

“Because there always is, Dean. Every time.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Get it over with. Please. Tell me what it is.”

Artemis sighed. “Your mortal body can’t handle the power contained within it, right? So you would have to be… less mortal.” 

“’Less mortal.’” He huffed. “That’s a unique way of putting it.”

“It’s a pretty unique proposition. I don’t think it’s been offered in a few thousand years.” She grinned wryly. “It’s not something we offer lightly, Sam.”

“I can see why.” He sighed, or tried to and wound up coughing instead. “Ambrosia, right?” She nodded. “Does it really turn your blood to ichor?”

“Well, maybe a little.”

“Who cares?” Dean grabbed his arms and guided him to a seat. “Sam, think about this. You’d be alive. You’d be alive for a very long time.”

“Humans don’t have ichor for blood, Dean. Aren’t you the one who was all concerned about how far from human I’d fallen when I started using my abilities?” He met his brother’s eyes. “Look, Dean, it’s okay. I’m okay with what’s happening. I’ve made my peace with it. I made peace with it before the first trial, honestly. It’s very nice – I’m honored,” he turned to Artemis, “that you all would think I’d be worthy of that offer. Thank you. I mean that. But I’m saying no.” 

“Sammy –“

“Dean, listen. I’m not ambitious. There’s nothing left that I actually want or need to do. I can’t let myself get caught up in ideas about immortality or power or desires or anything like that. I’ve seen what happens down that road – and you have too. You know better. I need to just let it go, just like we talked about.”

“Sammy, no. Don’t do this. I can’t live without you, you know this. Why do you think I brought you back after Cold Oak?”

“And look what it got us, Dean. What’s dead should stay dead. You know that.” He put a hand on Dean’s arm as Gilliel put an arm around his shoulder. “You’ll be fine. You’ve got Cas, you’ve got Kevin, you’ve got Garth and Charlie. Artemis is on board with the whole Heaven thing. So is Crowley, for whatever that’s worth to you. You’ve survived before. You’ll survive now. I love you, Dean, and I’ll miss you, but enough is enough. And I’ve had enough. My time is up and you need to let me go.” It hurt to see Dean’s face, but he knew he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t let his brother doubt his resolve. 

Dean’s lip trembled. He slammed his hand on the table and jerked to his feet. “Son of a bitch!” he yelled, storming off toward the bowels of the bunker. 

Artemis put a hand on his. “I wish you’d reconsider,” she whispered.

“Thank you.” He looked up at her. “I mean it. But I can’t. I just… I just can’t.”

“I’m sorry.” She left the room too, hurriedly.

Sam and Gilliel were left alone in the library, silent.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I took the opportunity to tie up a minor loose end from Season 8 that bugged me. It's fan fiction. That's what it's for.

Sam generally worked from his room after that. He left the door open, in case someone wanted to ask him something. Either Gilliel or Artemis usually hung out in there with him, because apparently he was too weak to be left alone and he needed a freaking bodyguard at all times. Well, it was true. His strength ebbed a little more each day, even with the supernatural assistance he received. Gilliel worked on her own translations while Artemis worked on – well, who knew what she worked on? More often than not it was Gilliel who stayed with him while Artemis trained with Dean or the novice hunters Cas and Kevin.

Angel sightings started to crop up, and that wasn’t really a good thing for anyone. Apparently Heaven hadn’t been as orderly as Naomi had made it seem, with different factions vying for control at different times after Castiel’s stint as God. The feuding had been forced onto Earth along with the warriors promoting it, and no one was particularly concerned about hiding anything from the humans. It wasn’t exactly commonplace but there were enough reports of apparently homeless people seeing each other and suddenly tearing into each other with long knives to make the team suspicious. Only the fringier news outlets mentioned the bright, blinding light that burst forth when the knives found a home in one of their opponents, bright enough to actually melt the eyes of any onlookers. The quest to re-open Heaven took on even greater urgency if that were possible. Of course, the job went on as well. There were still vengeful spirits, werewolves and other things that went bump in the night and the hunter population had not exactly replenished itself since the Apocalypse. Dean saw it as a good opportunity to get Kevin and Cas’ feet wet before they started fighting angels for real. Cas chafed at the training wheels. Sam got it. The fallen angel had been fighting for eons. At the same time, he’d been fighting as a “multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent.” Only some of the time had he fought while enclosed in a vessel and even that would have been vastly different. As a vessel himself (empty at the moment, but a vessel nonetheless) Sam was acutely aware of the difference in sensation, in motion. In how it felt to give and to receive a hit. He knew that Cas would still probably not accept that kind of advice or commentary from scum like him, so he passed a note to Gilliel and to Dean. They could try to explain it to him.

At first they only took jobs that were within a day’s drive of the bunker and that was fine. He welcomed the reduction of people in the bunker, the reduction of noise. He didn’t even really mind not going out with them. He didn’t like hunting, really. He hated the mindless killing, the risk of Dean’s death. He felt a pang knowing that someone who really had come to hate him was sitting in his spot in the Impala but that was inevitable. It wasn’t his spot anymore, wouldn’t be again and he had to accept it.

Eventually though they needed to take jobs that were a little farther out, far enough to require overnight stays and changes of clothing. Three travelers meant three sets of bags to lug around, which meant that the things Sam had left in the Impala needed to come out. That gave him another little pang but really, he shouldn’t have expected anything else. The Impala had never been his (except when it was), it was Dean’s car and Dean needed to use it for the job. The job wasn’t going to wait for him. So he kept his mouth shut as his few remaining artifacts were pulled from the back seat and the trunk – a spare bag of ritual components because you never know when you might need to summon something, an old box of books belonging to Bobby. And then they’d come back inside. “Sammy, what the hell, man?” Dean complained.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “You’re going to have to give me more details than that.” He ran his fingers over the spine of a familiar text – an obscure book of Chinese demonology. He couldn’t read it of course, but maybe Saraswati would know someone who could. It was probably an old dialect –

“That hammer in the trunk, dude. It weighs a ton. I can’t lift it. None of us can lift it. What the hell is it?” He got to his feet and walked, with Gilliel, out into the sunshine. He’d thought he wouldn’t see it again and the stuff was frankly blinding. Once his eyes adjusted Gilliel guided him toward the Impala, where the trunk was wide open. Artemis stood beside the car, arms folded across her chest with an unreadable expression on her face. The goddess was good at unreadable expressions. It came with being divine, he supposed. 

Sam frowned at Dean. “Don’t you remember that?” he asked. “That’s Mjolnir. From when they tried to auction off Kevin that one time.” 

Dean’s mouth moved. “I can’t even say that.”

“The hammer of Thor,” Cas supplied suspiciously. “Why do you have it?” 

“It was one of the items that had been auctioned. We were all unarmed and I needed something to fight the demons with so I grabbed it.” He shrugged. “No big deal.”

“’No big deal,’” Gilliel repeated. “You actually wielded this weapon?”

“Yeah. Twice.”

“We tried to pick it up and it wouldn’t budge,” Kevin said. “Gave me a shock. Cas, too.”

“It didn’t shock Dean, or us when Dean tried to lift it with us,” Cas recalled. “But even with three men trying to lift it the hammer wouldn’t move.”

Sam shook his head. “You’re being ridiculous.” He picked the hammer up with one hand. To be honest he could feel the electricity running through him but not in the way he had the day he’d actually used it. There was no one around that the thing felt compelled to smite. “It’s not that heavy. Come on, I can’t even lift four books anymore and I can lift it.”

Artemis shook her head. “That’s because Mjolnir has chosen you, Sam,” she said. She glanced at Cas. “It sees you as a hero, a worthy successor to Thor. Someone along the lines of Heracles or Rostam.” She reached out and put a hand on his arm, just for a moment. “As do we.” He knew exactly who constituted “we,” and most of them were not there. She frowned. “If you had this, why did you not bring it into your confrontation with us?”

He sighed. “The goal was never to kill anyone, Artemis. The goal was to reason with your father. Going in with a god’s weapon wouldn’t have put anyone in the right mindset, you know? I know things didn’t work out the way we wanted them to – for you, for him, for anyone – but our intentions were peaceful.” She nodded, blinking a little.

Sam took the hammer and stumbled back to the bunker and his bed.

His bed became a more noticeable component of his life as the weeks progressed. Thanks to Gilliel and Apollo the fever and pain remained manageable and the lung issues didn’t progress. The only thing that did progress was the fatigue. When he first got back from California he was able to stay awake for roughly ten hours at a stretch. After about a week he found he needed a nap in the middle of that span, usually forty-five minutes to an hour. By the second week the nap expanded to an hour and a half, and by the third week his “good night’s sleep” had expanded to fifteen hours. He didn’t generally get more than four hours’ wakefulness at a stretch anymore and it was pretty apparent (to him at least) how the end would come. His strength ebbed quickly, too. By the end of the third week he needed help getting out of the bed, or getting out of chairs. Carrying more than two books at a time proved impossible. Some of that might have been remedied with improved nutrition but frankly Sam didn’t care. He wasn’t interested in prolonging anything. He focused on the task at hand – finding a way to help the others with getting into Heaven.

It was Sam who found the ritual, toward the end of the fourth week. He’d expected to find it in Elamite or Ugaritic or Canaanite or some other long-dead language from the vague area that had spawned the traditions from which their issues sprang. Instead it came from a Latin manuscript. He’d laughed out loud when he came across it, because he didn’t need Sanskrit or Farsi or freaking Enochian. He could have translated this one when he was fifteen if he’d wanted to, if he’d known to. The manuscript had been transcribed by a monk living in the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem during the Crusades. He’d translated it from something looted from a library associated with a school before the city had been conquered, a manuscript in Arabic. That text in turn had been copied from the Hebrew, copied from an earlier text that was also in Hebrew but a dialect used mostly in the Persian empire. A lot of the text consisted of poetry of a vaguely metaphysical nature, which Sam dutifully translated without even really registering, but when he got to the part with getting into heaven he actually sat up and took notice. The ritual itself was not terribly difficult. It required the usual components – lamb’s blood always seemed to be needed in anything to do with the Judeo-Christian heaven for some reason, angelica root, fulgurite, some other stuff that they’d largely anticipated. The words of the ritual were laid out, as were the activities. Some human blood was required, as was some blood of a creature from the plane desired. The amounts did not look to be dangerous. Some blood from the team looking to gain entrance as well – again, not enough to cause real harm. The words were written out in Latin but it was obvious that they would need to be translated. Sam could do that in his sleep and probably would. It was official. They could do this.

He asked Gilliel to help him up and they burst into the library. Sam felt it was time for his nap but his elation managed to keep him awake for now. Artemis found him a blanket as the others crowded around the war room table. He showed them his translation of the ritual and explained its provenance. Crowley grinned with delight. “Excellent job, Sam,” he declared.

Gilliel and Cas reviewed his work in greater detail before giving a grudging assent. “Indeed,” the latter said, rising and stretching his back. “I am uncomfortable with the source, given the number of translations of unavailable documents, but the ritual does seem consistent with what is appropriate for Heaven. For once it seems that the chain of communication has been accurate over the centuries.”

“This is magnificent, Sam,” Gilliel told him, and kissed his cheek. He wasn’t so far gone yet that he didn’t blush a bit at that. “Thank you.” He went back to bed after that. 

The next part of the plan, of course, involved a team. Humans – living humans – could not be part of the team, because living humans could not enter Heaven. Dead humans could only enter as souls, and that was equally impossible. A soul could not carry weaponry. Cas suggested that Sam try to take Metatron out when he got to Heaven but Sam just looked him in the eye. “You don’t really believe that’s where I’m going, do you?” Dean stormed off and wouldn’t talk to either of them for the rest of the day. Crowley was out, because while he was mostly cured he was still partly demon. An abomination, like Sam. Gilliel could not be part of the team because she was an angel and until the spell was broken they could do nothing to allow angels to return home. Artemis very much wanted to go – she liked fighting and she liked hunting, and Metatron sounded like the most deserving game she’d hunted yet – but no gods were permitted to enter each other’s realms. She could no more enter Heaven than the “usurping God,” as she called him, could enter Olympus. That didn’t mean that she didn’t have some ideas. 

A week after the ritual had been found, by which point Sam was reduced to six total hours of waking time per day (only two of which were consecutive at any given point), some familiar faces appeared at the bunker. The alarms had gone off first, of course, so they’d known to expect something supernatural. Of course the usual residents had gone straight for the weaponry, but Sam’s extra senses told him that whatever was outside was neither demonic nor angelic. A quick glimpse of Dean’s security system told him all he needed to know. “I know those folks,” he coughed after rushing into the control room.

“That’s not a folks,” Kevin objected, frowning at the grammar. “That’s half a horse.”

“That’s Bob,” Sam corrected. “He’s a centaur and he’s pretty awesome. And that’s Daphne with him, and Melania. I’ve never seen them dressed quite like that, though.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “What exactly did you get up to in California again?”

“They were at home then, Sam,” Artemis grinned. “They’re ready for a fight. I know why they’re here.”

Sam rose with her and let her open the door. “You’re not seriously just going to let them in, are you?” Dean objected.

“Why not? You let your friends in the house.” He held out his hand to Artemis, who passed over her dagger. He cut open his palm and drew the sigils he needed to admit the three guests. They glowed and faded. “Hi, guys,” he greeted with a genuine smile. “It’s good to see you.” 

They blinked. “You look like shit, Sam,” Bob told him bluntly, bowing to Artemis.

He shrugged. “It’s part of the gig. Come on in. Meet the gang. You already know Gilliel. These are Crowley, Castiel, Kevin and my brother Dean.”

Melania smiled at Kevin. The youth blushed. “Melania, no,” Daphne said firmly. “He’s human.” Melania pouted. “Restrict your flirting to Sam or Bob, please. We don’t need those kinds of complications.” Sam tried very hard to drive the images of maenads and centaurs out of his mind.

Dean scowled. “What are you trying to say about my brother?” Sam could see the hair on the back of Dean’s neck rise.

“It’s not like it’s news, Dean,” he said. “No hitting on the maenad. I mean it, hands off.”

“Maenads,” Melania corrected. “Xenovia and Cynthia are out in the woods with Larry and Steve. We’ve got a regular little army here.”

“All to storm your Heaven, Sam,” Bob grinned. It was an infectious gesture.

“I like it,” he nodded. “Nice. Not human, not gods, living and not barred from that plane. Perfect. Since Metatron has no allies you shouldn’t need more than that.” He swayed a little, and Daphne rushed to take an arm. “All right. This is good.” 

Cas frowned. “I’m uncomfortable with this,” he said. “They aren’t…”

“Don’t finish that sentence, Castiel,” Gilliel warned. “They’re the best hope that we have.”

Sam retreated back to his bed, having exhausted his two hours of wakefulness. He figured he was pretty much out of the game by now anyway, he didn’t need to be part of planning the assault on Heaven. His friends should get to know Dean better, get to forming a plan. They’d need that, and ultimately they’d like him better anyway. Most folks did, unless they were demons. Daphne still insisted on escorting him and helping him into bed, although he preferred a minimum of fuss. She looked around his room in confusion. “Is this really where you spend your days? It looks like a prison.” 

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, Daphne.”

“It does to me.” She kissed his forehead before leaving. He found his Californian friends, all of them, in the room when he awoke. That meant the new arrivals as well as Gilliel and Artemis. They were playing poker. Of course there wasn’t a lot of room in there, especially with Bob around, so they were playing poker on his legs. “Hey, guys,” he greeted. Melania stroked his hair back while Artemis helped him to sit up without disturbing the cards. “How’s it going?”

“About as well as can be expected,” Gilliel smiled. She handed him a glass of water. “They’re concerned about trying to direct the team in Heaven now. Castiel is becoming frustrated.”

“It came to blows, I’m afraid,” Bob said with a thin grin. “He had some less than angelic things to say on the subject of non-humans entering Heaven, even though you’ve apparently been there before?”

“It was all engineered.” Sam grimaced. He spent a lot of time trying not to think about his visit to Heaven. “The angel… A particular angel with a particular job invented a heaven for me because he was trying to drive a deeper wedge between Dean and me. And it worked. I’m really not supposed to be up there. And to be honest, having seen the part of Hell that isn’t the Cage, I can’t say that there isn’t much difference.”

“There’s less torture in one than the other,” Gilliel chided gently.

“That’s why Anna seemed so well adjusted when we saw her again,” he pointed out with a smile. “I hope you didn’t hurt Cas too badly, Bob. He’s new at this whole ‘human’ thing. All these emotions, all the brain chemicals and the hormones and everything, they’re flooding him and he hasn’t had thirty-odd years to get used to them the way that the rest of us have. He’s acting like a complete dick a lot of the time now, but he’ll even out eventually. Cas, or at least the Cas we knew, was a good guy. Once he gets himself under control and everything and makes sense of his own meat suit he’ll be a good guy again.”

“You forgive too easily.” Artemis played her hand. “If Bob hadn’t punched him I would have. I suspect even Dean would have at that point.” 

Which meant that Cas was trashing him again. Oh well. It wasn’t like he didn’t deserve it. “I’ve done a lot of shit, Artemis.”

“I turned a man into a deer and let him get torn apart by his own dogs,” she shrugged. “I still don’t feel compelled to take that kind of crap. Anyway, the problem is going to be navigation.”

“Neither Castiel nor I can really give people a map. Angels perceive Heaven differently from other beings and we navigate Heaven differently,” Sam’s angel explained. She played her hand. “For that matter, each human perceives Heaven differently upon entry. I can’t exactly draw a map.”

“Well, I might be able to help,” he said. “Did Dean try to explain it?” 

Melania snorted. “Yeah. There was some talk about a field, and a road, and Thanksgiving…”

“Right. Okay, so badly.” Everyone laughed. “The road is how both of us perceived what’s called the Axis Mundi. It’s a route through each individual heaven. When a soul gains entry – like ours did – it passes through a series of memories. They’re supposed to be good ones, unless some dick with wings decides to screw with things. The Axis cuts through the heavens but it isn’t a direct route. Everyone perceives it differently too. Dean and I saw it as a road because that’s all we know. Some people see a path, or a river, or who knows what.

“Now, ordinarily you’d have to walk through the whole thing aimlessly until you got to where you wanted to be – you found your actual heaven or whatever. There’s a way to shortcut it, though. When we were there we met up with a friend of ours who had died before we did, brilliant guy. His name was Ash.” He coughed but couldn’t help but smile at the memory of Ash. “I’ve never met a guy who was so cool with being dead. Anyhow, he figured out a way to hack Heaven. There’s a series of equations that can get you from place to place.”

“Equations,” Artemis repeated.

“Like really, super-advanced calculus,” Sam confirmed. He grinned. “He showed me when we were there. I can show you, if one of you is particularly good at math. Dean probably wasn’t even listening. He was drinking.”

“There’s beer in Heaven?” Bob paid more attention.

“There is at the Roadhouse,” Sam confirmed. “I’d recommend you stop in there but they won’t know you.” He shrugged. “You could always tell them Dean sent you. Come to think of it, you should know that equation anyway. It’s a safe place. If Michael and Zachariah couldn’t get in I’m pretty sure Metatron can’t. “ He gestured. “Who’s going to be the navigator?” 

They exchanged glances. “You think any of us took calculus?” Daphne asked. “I think only the maenads actually went to school. We’ll have to ask among them as to who the best mathematician was.” 

Sam nodded. “I’ll work with whoever she is to make sure she knows what to do. It’s a pretty simple concept once you get the hang of it.”

Bob grinned. “All right. You gonna sit there and math geek at us or you gonna play some poker?” 

Sam laughed and let himself be dealt into the next round.

Unfortunately none of the maenads had ever been mathletes. Or have taken calculus. Apparently that wasn’t on the list of prerequisites for being transformed into a maenad. He tried to sit down with Melania and give her a crash course in higher mathematics but apparently the concepts weren’t as simple as they’d seemed to be when Ash had explained them in Heaven. Or now. He spent a week on the project before everyone had to confess defeat. That was when Artemis, Gilliel and Dean approached him. Dean looked happy. Artemis looked troubled and Gilliel’s face was sad. “Sam,” the latter said. “We know you made a decision, but we need you to reconsider.”


	11. Chapter 11

Sam didn’t need to ask. “No.” His voice was raspy all of the time now, and he probably only spent about four hours awake at all.

“Sam, listen. You are almost out of time here.” Dean’s eyes shined like emeralds. “It doesn’t matter about ichor or anything like that –“ 

“It did five years ago, Dean. You would rather that I had died – you would rather that I had let you die, that I had let you burn in hell, that I not fight – than that I give up any piece of humanity that I had after what Azazel did.” He tried to put as much heat into his words as he could but he lacked the energy. “Yeah, I know now that going after Lilith was the wrong thing to do but neither of us knew it at the time and don’t pretend you did. The angels were feeding you just as many lines as she was feeding me.” He saw the stricken look on his brother’s face and he felt a little bad about it, but Dean got himself together.

“Sam, this is different.” 

“Is it?” He pulled himself into a sitting position as best he could. Gilliel helped him the rest of the way. “Is it different because we’re going after Cas’ grace? Or is it different because it’s for the angels? Because I know you love the guy, Dean, and I’m happy for you but to be frank he’s done at least as much shit as I have, he pushed me at some of the bad decisions I did make, and oh yeah, he made me insane and tried to kill me. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not ready to extend my lifespan on his behalf.” He gasped for breath and Gilliel’s touch brought it back to him. “We’ve met a lot of angels, Dean. I can think of exactly two of them who haven’t tried to screw us over or actively tried to harm us. Two. Balthazar and Gilliel, and Balthazar is well past caring what happens with Heaven.”

“How did you know about Balthazar?” the living righteous angel wanted to know as he rested his head on her shoulder.

“Psychic, remember?” Artemis sat on his other side and took his hand. He let her. It wasn’t like he could stop her and frankly it felt nice. “Now you want me to give up the two things that I’ve clung tightest to since I got out of Hell for them. For a guy who’s never seen me as anything but a way to get at you and a species that generally sees me at best as a very repulsive tool.”

“Gilliel doesn’t seem to see you as all that repulsive.” His brother’s jaw clenched.

“I don’t see Sam as repulsive at all,” the angel replied serenely. “But I was ordered to behave as though I did. I understand what he is saying. Sam, of all people, has the least reason to fight on behalf of the angels. His Hell, after all, was not populated by demons. Nor would demons have been keen to leave him where he was. Even demons aren’t so cruel.”

“Now what are these things you think you’ll have to give up again?” Dean asked, sitting down. His jaw still spasmed but he seemed to be controlling it. “Let’s see if we can’t set your mind to rest.”

“I’d be giving up what’s left of my humanity for one,” he shot back.

“You didn’t seem too concerned about your humanity when you were chugging down demon blood,” the older Winchester countered. “But that was all for you, wasn’t it? It made you feel powerful. It made you think you were strong.”

Sam looked away. “Dean, I think you should maybe excuse yourself from this conversation,” Artemis snarled. “If you can’t speak to your brother like a person maybe you just shouldn’t speak to him.”

“I think he needs to hear it!” he retorted. He couldn’t remain sitting. He sprang to his feet again, pacing in the tiny room. Sam watched his boots as they traversed the concrete floor. “He thinks he can be excused from this because of the precious humanity that he threw away.”

“Sam’s final two ingestions of demon blood were not his fault, Dean.” Gilliel’s arm was around his shoulders now. He didn’t deserve to have it there but there was no way he was going to move it. “He could no more have fought Famine’s influence over his addiction than you could have fought the urge to breathe while drowning. He did fight it for longer than anyone could have, and you saw that he controlled himself when given the opportunity to gorge.”

“What would you know about it, lady?”

“Because he prayed,” she snapped. “He prayed, and I was allowed to do nothing but watch. It was his strength and his strength alone that got him through that. Well, his strength and his desire to save his brother, which is what got him hooked on the blood in the first place.” She got herself under control. “And of course, he had to consume again to accommodate Lucifer.” Sam shuddered. He couldn’t help it. “If you don’t think that what he endured in the Cage was sufficient punishment for his sins in that regard –“

“There is no sufficient punishment,” Sam murmured. “The point is that I don’t have a lot of humanity left and I’m not so eager to give it up for them.”

“You were willing to give it up for yourself,” Dean shot back.

“No,” Artemis intervened, squeezing Sam’s hand. It was such an odd gesture from such callused hands. She wasn’t known for being a gentle goddess. “That isn’t why he did it, not at first.”

“Oh really? What could possibly have made you think that was a good idea, Sam? Because I’m not seeing where using the powers a demon gave you, becoming less human every time you used them, was anything but a selfish decision.”

“Oh, right, I was just supposed to let you rot down there.” He snorted. “And then you came back and those goddamn angels were leading you around by the nose.” He got his temper under control. “I just… I just wanted to keep you safe. Things got out of hand and yeah, I know they never got better, and they never will, and that’s on me but god damn it Dean, I was so desperate to spare you from killing Lilith and that was the only way.” He inhaled, exhaled and coughed. “It doesn’t matter anymore. But you don’t get to sit here and tell me that I threw away my humanity for myself. I was desperate.” Gilliel stroked his hair, soothing him. There was part of him that still cringed at the thought of even this small intimacy from an angel. At the same time, Gilliel had been such a comforting presence for so long that she didn’t make his skin crawl. He glanced gratefully up at her. 

Artemis cleared her throat. “Sam, I can assure you that while there would be physiological changes your soul would remain intact. And I have it on very good authority that your soul is as human as it ever was, bright and shining in spite of everything. This has been done before, you know. Heracles partook. And like you he was possessed of a human soul but not entirely human physiology.”

“Didn’t his wife try to poison him?” Sam asked. 

“Yeah, well, he might be my brother but he kind of took after our father more than he ought, if you catch my meaning.” The goddess shrugged. “You’ll still look like you. Well, like a less sickly you. You’ll just… not get old. Or you know, die. From normal causes, anyway.”

“That brings us to item number two,” Dean said, getting his own temper in check. “What’s the second thing you’ve been clinging to?”

“An ending, Dean.” He sighed and relaxed into the comfort that the two women – celestial beings – whatever – offered. “What you want to do to me means that all of this will never end. It is literally the only thing left that I’ve had to look forward to in… a while.” He stopped himself from saying “since you got out of purgatory,” even though it was the truth. Maybe it had been longer since he’d had anything to look forward to. “It’s what I’ve been clinging to, the prize my eyes have been on. And now you’re demanding that I give that up too.”

“You’re damn right I am.” He leaned down, got his eyes right on level with Sam’s. “Winchesters don’t quit, Sammy.”

“Like hell, Dean. Remember when you were ready to pack it in and say ‘Yes’ to Michael? You packed up all your crap and were ready to mail it to Bobby. Not even to me, but to Bobby. Or when you sold your soul? How the hell was that not quitting on me? You expected me to go on alone but you just packed it all in. Same with Dad – he quit too. Just quit on you, quit on his family for the whole revenge thing. Don’t you even try to tell me he was doing it for family. He had a responsibility to raise his children right and he didn’t do it.” He leaned back again. “I’m just… I’ve done enough. I’ve given enough. And I know where I’m going, and I don’t even care. At least from there I can’t screw anything up anymore. That’s what I care about right now. If you force this on me I’ll just keep on poisoning everything I come in contact with until the end of time and you know it.”

Dean frowned, stood back and blinked. “What the hell are you talking about, Sam? You don’t –“ 

“Shut up, Dean.” Artemis wiped something away from her eyes, but Sam kept speaking. “I do. And I know you know it, because you’ve never been shy about telling me. You wanted to chaperone me back in the church. You think I need a babysitter to read a freaking textbook and you make someone check my work with every translation. I screw up, I know it, and you remind me of every misstep.” He let out a shuddering breath.

Gilliel kissed the side of his head. “Sam –“

“Please. Let me finish. I can’t be what you need me to be, Dean. I never could. I’m not cut out for the life you want, the life Dad wanted. It’s not me and no matter how much you cut me down to fit that… mold… I’ll never fit it. It’s been thirty years, man. If I haven’t fit it by now I never will. I’ve tried, I’ve tried so hard and the harder I’ve tried the more I’ve screwed it up. Even when I was a good hunter I was still not good enough for you, I still screwed everything up so just let me go. Find someone else to go into heaven. Give this crap to Garth; he’s studied, he’ll figure out how to navigate Heaven eventually. He’ll be able to figure out my notes well enough to get to the Roadhouse. Just… no.”

“Sam,” Dean said, putting a hand on his leg. Sam drew it back. “I don’t understand where any of this is coming from. You’re my brother, you’re awesome. Garth can’t do this. Ash will take one look at him and punch his lights out for being a twerp.”

“We aren’t offering the ambrosia to anyone else,” Artemis added in a half-whisper. “It’s not something we do… at all, really. Not in thousands of years. You’re the only one we’ve thought worthy. Whatever your brother thinks of you, we think you’re amazing. You’ve shown yourself to be every inch a hero.” She smiled a little sadly. “And those are a lot of inches. We were considering making the offer even before the angels fell. Speaking with Gilliel only solidified our intentions, and then the others got to meet you.”

“I understand that you want this to be over, Sam.” Gilliel pushed the hair out of his face again. “I do. And I respect that it is the last thing in the world that you want right now, especially considering all of the things that Heaven and the angels have done to you. You really are the only option, though. Having so many angels wandering the earth, letting their feuds – our feuds, I suppose – spill over into the human world, can only devastate humanity. It will become another Apocalypse, as bad as the one you stopped by your first sacrifice.”

“An advantage to taking this offer,” the goddess picked up, “is that it puts you beyond the usurping god’s creations. The machinations of Heaven and Hell will have no more influence over you than they would over Bob or Melania.” Her lips quirked. “Or me, I suppose.”

“It would remove the demon blood?” Dean perked up.

“No. That ancestry is as much a part of Sam as the Winchester DNA, or his psychic nature. What would change is his ability to be used, for example, as an angelic vessel. And he would still be partly human, just not mostly human.” She sighed. “I think it’s less important to think about your physical humanity than about your soul’s humanity, Sam. Your soul will not change from this. If anything, your soul will be safer now than it has ever been in your life. And it puts you in our orbit – not as a tool,” she hastened to assure him. “Not the way you’ve been used your whole life, by Heaven and Hell. But as a partner and a colleague.”

“You were willing to brave eternity to stop an Apocalypse once before, Sam,” Dean said, sitting down. “What’s one more?”

“The last time I wasn’t going to be able to break anything again,” he retorted. “Screw it. You’re going to do it to me anyway. Why are you even pretending to involve me in the decision?”

“Sam, I don’t want to force you!” Dean exploded into action again. “Why can’t you just –“

“Do what I’m told like a good little soldier?” 

Dean left the room.

Sam was alone with the women – Artemis and Gilliel, the goddess and the angel. He hadn’t really been able to look directly at them during the confrontation with Dean. His eyes had been locked on his brother, trying to impress his words upon him. They both had tears on their faces. “There isn’t any saving me from this is there?” he asked. 

The angel sighed. “Not without allowing another apocalypse.”

“Then why waste time?” 

Artemis blinked. “Sam?”

“I don’t have a choice. Not really. So why waste time? Just get it over with.”

She bit her lip. “I’d rather you were happier about it.”

“Look, Artemis. I know it’s an honor. Really, I do. And I appreciate that honor. It means a lot to me to know that someone thinks I’m worthwhile, you know? But really, I’m not. I’m just going to let you down.”

Gilliel touched her forehead to his. He fought off a split second of panic. “Sam, listen to me. This will be difficult for you to understand, because the opposite has been drummed into your head since you could understand language. The only people who have never made mistakes are people who have never tried to accomplish anything. They have never tried anything, they have never reached for anything. Maybe they’ve never had to. But you are loved, Sam Winchester. I have seen you at your worst. I have seen you at your lowest points. I am still here and I still have faith in you.” She turned his face so he looked up at her, and he met her deep blue eyes. “You will not face eternity alone, whatever happens.”

Artemis rose. “I’ll bring what we need,” she said. She returned a little later with a bowl of soup and some water on a tray. “Just eat like normal. Then go ahead and go to sleep. You won’t be at a hundred percent, not all at once. It will probably take a few days to a week before you’re able to make the assault on Heaven but that’s okay. You haven’t really trained or worked with the others yet, just drank some wine and played some cards with them. Which is fine,” she hastened to add. “They’re eager to work with you.” He swallowed his nausea and poked at the soup. It didn’t taste all that different from any other serving of Crowley’s vegetable soup. He duly went to sleep when he’d eaten as much as he could, unwilling to talk any more. His companions knew that he didn’t blame them. 

They stayed with him the whole night, too, or at least they were still there when he woke up the next morning. A morning when he was able to get out of the bed under his own power for the first time in weeks, and make it to the shower and clean himself off without the use of angelic grace. The humans in the bunker – and how distressing was it that he could separate them like that, and separate himself from them that way so easily now? – avoided him. He’d expected that. Of course they avoided him. They’d been making that distinction all along anyway, hadn’t they? Dean wouldn’t even look at him, but he accepted it. Dean would never want to look at him again. Once this was done Dean would probably hunt him. He would probably make it easy for his brother. 

Gilliel and Artemis stood by him, of course. They walked with him into the kitchen, watched while he got his own coffee. Shared the coffee with him, even. Bob and Melania and Daphne, too, continued to behave as though everything was normal. Indeed, they smiled and embraced him and shared their breakfast of eggs and toast with him. A breakfast he found he was actually pretty keen to enjoy. Even though he could walk and talk on his own again it was true that he was not up to a hundred percent. Gilliel worked to re-build his body from the ground up, helping to recover the muscle mass and stamina scraped away by the Trials. He’d believed he was being purified and that clearly hadn’t happened, but his new companions worked hard to convince him that they saw no taint. Crowley approached when he saw that Sam was speaking and not overtly homicidal. Kevin, too, began to warm up slowly. Oddly enough Daphne and Kevin already kind of knew each other – they’d been following each other on tumblr for months. Dean’s face darkened at the knowledge but Sam couldn’t find any evidence that any breach of secrecy had occurred on either side. Meeting each other live seemed to go well, at least, and give Kevin something other than tablets to think about. 

After two days Sam was able to run again, a pastime he re-adapted to with alacrity. There were enough hidden paths and trails that if they ran at the right times the centaurs could be included, along with Daphne and the maenads, so he made sure that they did so. He remembered having done an awful lot of running when he’d been in Heaven. It also gave them some shared experiences together. They started working through some simple training exercises as well. He wasn’t sure what kinds of illusions or constructs Metatron would be able to throw against them. He was pretty sure that they weren’t just going to be able to walk in, smite Metatron and walk out again. Oh yeah – and grab Cas’ grace. Doing a little bit of everything would get them used to one another’s reactions, or more to the point get Sam used to the rest of the team’s reactions. They all knew each other and had worked together before.

“Sam,” Artemis encouraged as she watched and counseled them. “You have other advantages. You should be using them.”

“What are you talking about?” he wanted to know, stretching after an intense sparring session. He still bruised easily – anemia, he supposed. He needed to up his iron and protein intake. Fortunately food had flavor again, not that he’d ever been much of an eater to begin with.

“Your telekinesis.” She crouched down and helped him to stretch his back. “You need to be prepared to use it wherever you are. What’s the harm? You’re beyond the reach of Hell now, remember?” She grinned. “Even if that particular ability had been infernal, which it wasn’t, it doesn’t matter anymore. You need to let yourself use it. It could mean the difference between success and failure.”

He sighed. He’d been holding himself back for so long now that using his non-infernal abilities consciously and openly felt just as wrong as public urination. Still, the goddess was right. He wasn’t human anymore. He never would be again, and to be honest he never had been. He needed to accept it and move on. He glanced at the cooler, which Bob had just opened. With an exhalation that still made him feel a little giddy after so long not breathing right he reached out with his mental muscles and grabbed two beers, bringing them to his hand. She grinned and accepted the one he handed her. “You were practicing already,” she chided.

“Maybe a little. Not much else to do when you’re stuck in bed alone, you know?” he admitted with a blush. “I can’t lift much, but I guess that’ll come with time. Maybe. It was never my strong suit, but I never really encouraged it, you know?”

She shook her head. “You should never leave a weapon unused. Whatever. Water under the bridge. Have you spoken to your brother?”

He shrugged. “No. Don’t really expect to either. Cas is getting antsy. He wants to get this underway like yesterday.” He rolled his neck from side to side.

“He’s impatient. Odd for someone who’s been an angel.”

“He’s never been mortal. I guess he’s feeling it. I tried explaining this to Bob and the others before. He’s… us humans have had our whole lives to get used to the whole neurochemical thing, and the whole hormonal thing. He got hit with it all at once. He’s not really such a jerk, or at least he didn’t used to be. And he’s feeling guilty about what happened. He was always very concerned about what was happening in Heaven, you know? Once he figured out that everything up there was corrupt he just wanted to fix it, but the harder he tried to fix it the more screwed up everything got.” He chuckled and sipped from his beer. “I can relate.” 

“Is there anyone you haven’t forgiven, Sam?” Bob asked. “Crowley told me yesterday you even forgave the demon who possessed you.” 

He shrugged, uncomfortable. “Well, yeah. I mean, it sucked. It sucked a lot. But I’ve done a lot of crap too, and she was doing what she was doing for a lot of the same reasons I was doing what I was doing, just in a mirror, you know? And then afterward she wound up kind of on our side, helping us out. She gave her life to save us, in the end.” 

“He mentioned that.” The centaur opened his beer. “So who haven’t you forgiven? Come on, there has to be someone.” 

“Sure. Azazel. Brady. Lucifer. Michael.” 

“Did any of them ask for forgiveness?” Artemis asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Well, now that you mention it no. I think Brady might have tried but I cut his vocal cords pretty quickly.” He could talk about it easily now. “I don’t think I’m planning to let Metatron ask either, to be honest. Although if you have other plans, let me know.” 

Gilliel appeared beside him. “I don’t think that will be necessary, Sam, but as the resident angel I commend your general commitment to the principle of reconciliation.” She grinned and produced a glass of wine from somewhere.

“Did you learn that from Balthazar?” Sam asked her.

“As a matter of fact we were close before he faked his death. Your preparations seem to have come along well, Sam. How much longer before you storm Heaven?”

“Two days, tops,” he assured her. “I can’t think of a reason to wait.” 

She sighed. “I can think of a few. But it’s probably best to get it over with. What weaponry will you bring?”

“The centaurs’ bows have been tipped with broken angel blades,” Artemis informed. “It was Crowley’s idea. Otherwise, everyone’s arms have been replaced with angel blades. It seems that all of the turmoil in Heaven has freed up quite a few of the things. Sam has a gun with angel-blade bullets – they’re effective, according to Castiel, and he’s used to fighting with a gun. He’ll also have Mjolnir.”

“How will we get to Maine?” Sam asked. “We haven’t really gone into that yet. I think the whole lot of us is too large for you to just teleport us there.”

“Yes, but the centaurs should be fine between the two of us. You, Daphne and the Maenads can drive. Someone named Charlie has taken care of financing a car,” Gilliel explained. “I don’t know who Charlie is, although I seem to recall that you asked after her safety in some of your prayers. Anyway, you should be comfortable in that. Two days, then.” Sam sighed. Two days before harrowing Heaven. Gilliel and Artemis both put their arms around him. “It will be fine, Sam,” Gilliel assured him. “When you return we will be waiting for you.”


	12. Chapter 12

The next two days passed quickly. Artemis and Gilliel both worked with the assault team to prepare them for the mission, both physically and tactically. Gilliel of course had information about Heaven and what to expect, what Metatron might be able to create to defend himself. It was funny though – training had been such a feature of Sam’s life that he couldn’t even see trailers for Training Day without flinching, but this didn’t have the same edge that his childhood did. They worked hard. Of course they did. They also genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, which took a lot of the harshness and edge off. There was no storming off to separate rooms or corners or the library or wherever at the end of the day, no quiet plotting to run off to some distant town and silently disappear after an afternoon of Hell. Instead there was beer, and storytelling, and laughing. 

It was actually kind of fun. 

Of course, all good things must come to an end and after two days he found himself behind the wheel of a frankly nice mini-van with four women. He’d never thought he could use the term “mini-van” in conjunction with the word “nice,” but there you have it. He supposed it happened when his odometer hit thirty years or whatever. The drive would be four days, assuming eight-hour limits in the car. He and Dean had done more, but no one involved thought that was a great idea. Well, Cas thought it would be a good idea to speed it up a bit but frankly no one cared. They wanted to be fresh for the fight, or whatever they found upstairs. They didn’t need to be worn out and cramped from sitting in a mini-van for however long. For once the stops were pre-planned far enough in advance that they actually had reservations at hotels along the way – Charlie’s doing again. 

Much to Sam’s surprise it was not only the minivan that left on Monday morning. The Impala followed them, leaving Kevin and Crowley holding down the fort. Gilliel and Artemis would probably manage to keep things under control for a while at least, or so Sam hoped. Why the guys were following Sam couldn’t quite figure out but whatever – maybe they were just eager to get out of Kansas for a while. Maybe they’d found something to hunt up in Maine.

Maybe they wanted to see how badly Sam managed to screw up. 

They pulled out at about eight in the morning. There was no good way to avoid the rush hour traffic near Chicago but this should help avoid the worst of it. Sam was the first driver but he didn’t get stuck with all of the driving duties. Cynthia insisted on pulling over after a couple of hours and taking over, followed by Daphne, and then Xenovia. Dean groused about it every time they pulled into a rest area or parking spot to make the switch but the ladies were insistent. There was absolutely no reason, Daphne explained firmly, to subject any one person to making the entire drive. “In fact,” the nymph offered with a smile, “we can cycle through and drive your car too if you’d like. That way you’ll be more comfortable –“

The peals of feminine laughter as Dean spluttered made even Cas laugh. Sam couldn’t help but grin.

They stopped for the night a little ways outside of Chicago – far enough outside that the traffic wasn’t such an issue but close enough in that there were actual places to stay. Charlie’s funding sources of questionable legality had sprung for places that didn’t suck – clean beds, no questionable stains on the ceiling, that sort of thing. They checked in. Sam actually got a room to himself for once, and then they went to dinner. They had their choice of chain restaurants in the area, although Sam drew the line at Ruby Tuesday’s. They settled on someplace bland an innocuous and actually had a good time. Cas managed to behave civilly – maybe because he had Dean by his side, maybe because they were making progress toward his ultimate goal, maybe because the hormones were finally starting to even out. Who knew? Sam’s salad wasn’t awful for chain restaurant fare. He was just happy that it didn’t taste like rot anymore. They stayed for pie – pecan, a favorite of his brother’s – and a drink or two and then made their way back to the hotel. It being too early for bed they stayed up and played cards for a little while in Daphne and Melania’s room. Dean argued for strip poker. Sam wondered if it was fear of the maenads’ powers or Cas’ jealousy that made him and Daphne intervene. Either way, Sam retired to his own room after about ten thirty.

He wasn’t particularly tired – he’d slept enough while he was busy dying that he didn’t know if he’d ever feel tired again. He didn’t want to push it more than he had to, though, and while he was fond of all of his friends individually crowds still made him nervous. He stretched out and booted up his laptop, more out of habit than for any other reason, when the subtle sound of wings rustled into the room. He startled. “Hi, Sam,” Gilliel smiled. 

He put his knife back under the pillow. He hadn’t even remembered pulling it out. “Hey,” he greeted, forcing his muscles to relax as the adrenaline retreated. “It’s good to see you, don’t get me wrong, but what are you doing here? I thought you were bringing the centaurs to the Hundred-Mile Wilderness.”

“I am, Sam. Or rather, I did. They’re already there. Artemis is with them. I know, we were going to try to keep Crowley and Kevin from being left alone together for a little longer and we will be checking in with them periodically, but Steve, Bob and Larry were a lot less enthusiastic about hanging around Kansas without you to keep them company. It seems that Crowley is an inadequate substitute and they aren’t particularly interested in Skyrim. Kevin doesn’t have much in common with them.” She frowned. “I like to think I’ve got a decent grasp of ‘human things’ but I’m not sure I get Skyrim.”

“It’s not important,” he assured her. “Can I offer you anything? I think there might still be some folks hanging out in Melania and Daphne’s room, they might be a little more lively.” She shrugged. “I’m not really here to play poker, and I think Daphne is sufficient adult supervision for Dean and Castiel with the maenads. They’re a little… less susceptible when they’re together.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up at him. 

“Yeah, well. It’s taking them long enough to admit anything.” He chuckled. “They’ll get there eventually. It’s kind of a new thing for both of them, you know?”

“I don’t get the impression that Castiel will be inclined toward patience,” his friend grimaced. “That has not been his modus operandi of late.”

“No,” he agreed. “And that’s fine too. Maybe Dean needs a little shaking up now and then. He can be kind of… uh… emotionally constipated, I guess.” His cheeks pinked up when she laughed. “What?”

“I would never have even thought to use such a descriptive term, but it perfectly describes him. You don’t think he’d hurt Castiel, do you?”

“Not on purpose.” He shook his head. “He cares tremendously for Cas. He just doesn’t show it well.”

“He doesn’t show his affection to you very well either.” 

Sam actually squirmed. “That’s different. We’re brothers. We grew up together, always in each other’s faces. Literally – more often than not we were in motel rooms, about this size. Two growing boys and sometimes our dad if we were lucky. It’s really easy to get on each other’s nerves, and it’s really easy to make assumptions about what the other one knows. And then there’s all the ways I’ve let Dean down over the years. That kind of crap doesn’t get forgiven, however much he might have loved me.” 

She sighed. “He still loves you, Sam. And you’re perceiving failures where success was impossible. Where it wasn’t expected. He didn’t expect anyone to get him out of Hell – not you, not anyone. So you shouldn’t feel that you let him down.” 

“But I did. Working with Ruby, doing exactly what he said he didn’t want me to do as I tried to take down Lilith –“

She grabbed his hand and guided him back to a seat. “Sam, you need to let it go. You need to forgive yourself, relax your heart about it. You can’t change the past, so you need to move forward. You’re an amazing person. Remember, you’re the one, the only one, to whom the Olympians were willing to offer ambrosia. I know you still see it as a punishment but really, Sam, that’s a big deal.” She smiled. “There is no one who hasn’t made mistakes, who hasn’t done things they are maybe less proud of.”

“Did they start the Apocalypse? Or leave their brother to rot in Purgatory? Or run around without a soul for a year and a half?” 

“You could have done nothing about any of those things, Sam. It was Cas who botched your resurrection. You couldn’t have even known that there was a problem much less fixed it. You could not have opened purgatory without knowing about rogue reapers, and you didn’t even know that’s where he was. And you could not have known that your actions would break the final seal – you firmly believed that you were stopping the Apocalypse, not starting it. And you were solidly manipulated by Heaven into so believing.” She smiled gently. “I know you won’t believe me, but it’s the truth. You need to learn to forgive yourself, Sam. None of your new companions condemns you.”

“They don’t really know me very well, do they?” 

She smiled then. “I don’t condemn you either, and I’ve known you since you were two.” 

He chuckled a little. “I forget sometimes, you know?”

“What, that I’ve known you longer than you’ve known me?” 

“Maybe, yeah. That you’re an angel, I guess.” Her eyebrows knit together. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to offend you.”

“I… I don’t think I am offended. I should be, I suppose.” She grimaced. “I know that your experiences with angels haven’t exactly been positive… and I haven’t known the Olympians long.”

He paused. There was something on the tip of her tongue, but she needed to be the one to let it make the leap. “My experiences with you have been wonderful, Gilliel,” he told her honestly.

“I’ve kept you on your feet and pestered you into extending your life against your will,” she disputed, waving an elegant hand.

“No. You eased my physical pain tremendously, which allowed me to be productive. Being productive, being able to contribute something both with finding this ritual and finding the ritual to break Persephone’s curse, helped me feel a little better emotionally and mentally and that’s wonderful. And yeah, you were there when Dean came in to make me take the stupid ambrosia, but he was going to do it anyway, remember? I really didn’t have any choice. You didn’t pester me. You made it more bearable, Gilliel.” He met her eyes squarely. “That counts for a lot. You and Balthazar… you’re the only angels who’ve ever really just… helped, you know?” 

She laughed then, maybe with a bit of sadness to it but it was laughter all the same. Two full wine glasses appeared in her hands and she passed one to him. “To Balthazar.” They raised their glasses. “Do you think that… maybe I could do what he did? Just kind of forget to go back, hang around here on Earth when the gates are opened again?” 

He paused. “Is that what you would want? I mean, you’ve only been around us here for a few weeks.”

“Heaven wasn’t exactly heavenly, Sam. I should miss it more than I do. I miss my siblings, but not the infighting. Balthazar did it. Gabriel, too. Anna, although she chose a different path. Why not me?” She sighed. “It’s not like I’d be alone. I have friends here. You, Artemis, Dionysus, Ariadne.” 

He sipped from his glass, unsurprised to find that it was some of the best wine he’d ever tasted. She’d learned from Balthazar, after all. “I… If you wanted to stay of course I’d do anything that I could to help you stay, to be here for you.” He felt his cheeks flush a little. “It’s a big decision, to turn away from your family like that. Believe me, it’s something I know a lot about.”

“You missed Dean terribly,” she recalled. “Prayed for him every night.” 

“Yeah. And I came so close, so incredibly close to calling him so often while I was at Stanford. I don’t think there are words to describe how hard it was to know that he was only at the other end of the phone and not reach out, you know? Sometimes it physically hurt to not hear his voice, but I couldn’t call.”

“And he didn’t call you,” she reminded him.

“No.” He took a drink and leaned back against the headboard a little. “I don’t think it was as bad for him as it was for me. He was with Dad, he had all the familiar things. He had his orders, after all. But that’s not the point. The point is, if you do this you need to go into it with your eyes open, Gilliel. I’ll back your play no matter what it is, but I don’t want you to make a decision without all the facts. And while I know you angels aren’t supposed to be emotional, I’ve been a vessel, remember? I’ve had an angel in my head.” 

She cringed. “You don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to, Sam.” 

He smiled. He didn’t want to think about that, not really, but if it would help his friend he could tolerate it for a little while. He truly barely thought of her as an angel anymore, at least most of him didn’t. “The point is, most folks think angels can’t feel. I know better, and so do you. You need to think about how you’re going to handle that, the overwhelming desire to connect again.” She nodded slowly. “It’s not something you need to decide right away, obviously. You have time. What we’re doing now is just getting Metatron and figuring out how to reverse the spell, and I doubt it will re-open Heaven quite so quickly. But it is something to think about, okay?”

“Okay.” She bit her lip. “Sam, would it be okay if I sat closer to you?” 

He smiled at her. “Yeah. That would be fine, Gilliel.” The angel edged up until she sat beside him and rested her head on his shoulder. He put an arm around her, and she around him. It should have been awkward. It should have made his skin crawl. 

It didn’t. 

She opted to join them for breakfast the next morning after his morning run. Cas shot Sam some very dark looks over his self-made Belgian waffles. The taller hunter ignored them. He was on a mission. He did not need to trouble himself with insinuations from his brother’s non-boyfriend. His own brother’s sly grins he likewise ignored. When they left Sam was surprised to be invited to ride in the Impala for part of the way, while Cas rode with the ladies. Daphne agreed to keep a handle on things with the maenads and to let them know if a change needed to be made. Sam shrugged. If Dean was actually voluntarily seeking out his company he wasn’t going to say no, and he could always demand the switch himself if things got hairy. 

They didn’t. Dean did take the opportunity to leer at him about Gilliel, although he accepted Sam’s, “Dude, no. It wasn’t like that,” after a little good-natured teasing. Sam considered teasing back about Cas but decided not to. After all, this was Dean. He didn’t need to get slugged on his way to a showdown with the only angel in Heaven. Instead, he quizzed him about the hunts they’d gone on while he’d been out of it. Dean was still pretty enthusiastic about both Cas and Kevin’s progress as hunters. Neither of these things surprised Sam in the least. Cas had been a warrior for thousands of years if not more; the fact that he was in a human body shouldn’t suddenly make him incompetent. Kevin was crafty and he was smart and he was strong under all those layers and all that stress – he’d be fine. “Best part is they can both fit in the back seat,” Dean told him. “Like, together. Your seat is still your seat, man.” 

He snorted and shook his head. “You seriously think you’re going to want to take a freak like me out on hunts?”

“Why not? I took a freak like you out on hunts before, man. The only difference is that now you won’t die from cholesterol like the rest of us.”

“Cholesterol doesn’t kill, Dean. It’s the effects of cholesterol that might kill – “ he cut himself off. “We can talk about it after we fix the Heaven problem. I don’t think it will actually solve the angelic infighting, but if it gets them off our plane I’m happy.” He glanced at his brother. “I’m not sure everyone is on board with the whole ‘bring-the-abomination-along’ plan anyway.”

“What, you mean Cas? Nah, he’s just pissy because he thinks you’re corrupting his sister.” He grinned. “How come you’re not pissier about him corrupting me?”

“I very much doubt there’s much he could do to corrupt you, Dean. However corrupt Heaven is – was – you’re still you.” Was that a confession? “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to give up the seat, though.”

“He’ll figure it out. It’s not like you physically fit in the back seat, Gigantor. Listen. We’re good, right?” 

Ugh. Somehow since coming back from Purgatory Dean had bounced between enough chick-flick moments to beat the band and channeling their father’s ghost. This was clearly a chick-flick moment time. Sam wasn’t sure which was worse and he wasn’t sure what to say. “You forced immortality on me, Dean. I get why you did it, I guess, but you still took my choice away. I’m not okay. It’s going to be a long time before I’m okay, if ever. But you’re still my brother and I love you, all right?”

Dean hesitated for a moment, then he nodded. “I guess.”

“And while I’m not thrilled about being on the team to kick Metatron’s ass, I’m glad it’s going to get done.” 

“I’m glad you’re on the team, Sammy,” Dean said then. “I don’t really tell you this kind of thing a lot, but there’s no one I’d rather see going up there to do this. You’re not going to screw around. You won’t get caught up in revenge or anything like that, drawing it out or some crap. You’ll just do the job and go. Even when you were… even when you had Brady in your hands, knowing what you knew, you didn’t draw it out or anything. You’re a good man, Sammy.”

Sam blinked. Had Dean really just said that? “Thanks, Dean.” Thank G – Thank whoever that his phone buzzed, letting him know he had a text message. “Looks like Cas needs to make a change,” he said. “We’ll switch at the next rest stop.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “He told you?” 

“Er, no. Melania asked me if his nose was supposed to bleed like that.” He shrugged. “It’s not their fault. They’re trying not to do anything.”

“I know. You’re immune, though.”

“Not human, remember?” 

“But they didn’t bother you before?”

“I wasn’t human then either.” He looked out the window.

“I guess every cloud has a silver lining, right Sammy?” His grin was forced, but at least he was forcing a grin.

Their next hotel stop was in Erie, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t Sam’s first time there. He wasn’t sure what the point of Erie, Pennsylvania was. It would have been faster to go through Canada but no one was keen on going over the border with two vehicles full of weapons and God – er, whoever – knew how many wanted criminals in tow. Besides, the Canadian route would have taken them right through Detroit, and neither Sam nor Dean was particularly keen to ever lay eyes on the Motor City again. Even Erie was cutting it a little close for Sam. Gilliel joined him in his room again. The feeling was a little less awkward than it had been the night before, and he had to admit that he had returned to his room a little early solely in hopes of finding her there. He wasn’t disappointed. He couldn’t figure out just why she was there but her presence made him less tense so he wasn’t going to question it. He’d made mistakes with his affections before, but if he didn’t let himself go too far it would be okay, right? And where was the harm in a glass or two of wine and a shared shoulder between friends?

She was happy to hear that he’d spent some time alone with his brother. “Your bond has been strained over the past few years,” she admitted, settling into the space between his arm and his torso like she’d been there her whole life. “Things haven’t been great between you, but it was that bond that allowed you to defeat Lucifer and stop the Apocalypse. And he does love you, Sam. Even more than he loves Castiel, which is saying a lot.” 

He grinned. “Those two are something. They deserve to be happy.”

“So do you.” He squirmed a little. “You don’t think you do?”

“I’ve done a lot of bad things, Gilliel.”

“So has your brother. So has Castiel.” Her dark lips gave a sly little quirk. “But they know that they can be happy with the other. I don’t know that they’ve discussed this yet, but at least each of them knows. Do you know what will make you happy, Sam?” 

“I know what makes me content,” he said after a moment’s thought. “I’ve never… I stopped letting myself think beyond that, you know? Beyond what makes me content right now, that sort of thing. Being around you, Artemis, the rest of the team. People I don’t need to hide from. I mean, you know everything I’ve done, Gilliel. Everything I’ve been, everything I am, and you’re still here.”

“I am. And I very much enjoy being here, Sam.” She gave a contented sigh. “I am where I wanted to be for decades. That probably sounds strange to you.”

“A little.” He laughed. “But it’s a good kind of strange. I don’t want…”

“What?”

“Well…” He hesitated. “I don’t want to influence your decision, to make you feel pressured either way. But I also want you to know that you’re valued, and that I’d miss you terribly if you decided to go back to Heaven. I don’t want you to not be around, you know?”

She inclined her head up and placed a chaste kiss on his lips. “You care for me.”

“Well, yeah. I’m glad you’re in my life.”

She squeezed his chest as best she was able. “And I am glad you’re in mine.”


	13. Chapter 13

The third overnight stop was in Middlebury, Vermont. Artemis popped into the mini-van to check in during the drive. Apparently the centaurs were having fun up in Maine getting their campsite ready and messing with hikers. Sam disapproved. Artemis had initially disapproved as well until Bob revealed that the hikers had been stoned out of their gourds and not terribly safe on the trails they were on. The hunter remembered some of his college companions. He was pretty sure that a couple of half-horse guys would not have sounded like the strangest thing they’d have talked about seeing, and at least Bob, Steve and Larry would have guided them off the trails and back to safety. They were cool like that. As for setting up camp – had that been part of the agreement? “They’re people, not pack animals,” he objected. 

The goddess smiled. “They insisted, Sam. It’s not like they can stay at the Hampton Inn, at any rate, and if they’re setting up for them they might as well set up for all of us. It’s not much extra work. I will give you fair warning, though. Bob brought ouzo.” 

“Don’t we have a fight to get in tomorrow?” 

She shrugged. “My brother sent something that should purge any ill effects. From you, anyway. I wouldn’t slip it to your brother or his friend, but they’re not going to Heaven tomorrow so it’s kind of moot.” She looked around. “It’s nice country up here. Decent hunting.”

“Probably. I haven’t done much up here. I don’t think I’ve ever done a hunt in New Hampshire,” he admitted. 

“Really? I’m pretty sure there are books and books about the hauntings up here.”

“Oh yeah – just none of them ever attracted Dad or Dean’s attention, or Samuel’s. I guess they weren’t violent enough or anything. Most of the demonic crap was usually in Massachusetts or Rhode Island.”

“Sometime after this is done why don’t you, me and Gilliel head up here and do a little hunting together then?” the divinity suggested, leaning back in her seat. “If we can keep her around, of course. My family likes her. She likes us. She likes you. You like her.” She grinned and winked. Sam blushed. “It will be good for us.”

“We can talk to Gilliel about it.” Why couldn’t his face have developed some kind of inhuman ability to not blush in these kinds of situations? “I don’t want to be making decisions for her, but it sounds like fun. You two seem close.” 

“We are. We’ve gotten close, anyway. We haven’t known each other long, but when people have a common purpose they can get to be very close.” She shrugged, but she gave another sly smile. “So this is a mini-van. It’s not exactly a silver chariot across the night sky, but it will do.” 

“It comes with a DVD player,” Cynthia pointed out.

“What do you do with a DVD player in the car?” the goddess wondered. 

“We tried to watch dirty movies, but Daphne said no,” Melania pouted.

“The three of you wouldn’t be able to drive,” the nymph observed. “Then Sam tried to throw in a documentary about … what was it, again?”

“Excavations at Jericho,” he replied quickly with a grin. “Six-part series.”

“Xenovia almost fell asleep at the wheel within about five minutes, and that was just with the sound,” Daphne filled in. “So we’ve agreed just to talk and have the radio on. It’s been educational. Did you know sirens could take male form?”

Artemis raised an eyebrow. “I suppose it makes sense that they can, although I’ve never seen one do so. It depends on what their target desires, after all. It’s good to keep that in mind if you should go up against one in the future. Oh well – I’ll see you in camp.”

“Is there anything you want us to stop off and get on our way in?” Sam asked her. “No, just get there, would you? We’re getting lonely. Oh – Kevin says good luck, and Crowley asked you to kick Metatron in the bollocks for him.” She disappeared again. Sam wasn’t entirely sure why she’d appeared in the first place. 

They pulled into the park at about four o’clock. Ostensibly they’d be hiking to their campsite. In reality their divine and celestial escorts would be transporting them as soon as they were away from prying eyes, and that was precisely what happened. Soon enough Sam found himself ensconced in a downright home-like setting in the woods, seated before a roaring campfire with the scent of stewing venison before him. He knew that he probably oughtn’t to look too closely into the legality of hunting meat in this conservation area; the legality of hunting as it applied to creatures of myth was probably a tricky subject better left to guys who had actually graduated from a law program. 

True to Artemis’ warning he found a bottle being pressed into his hands. He was pretty sure ouzo wasn’t meant to be drunk straight, but no one else seemed to mind. He shrugged. When in Rome. Or, you know, backwoods Maine, where the deerflies were the size of your hands. Gilliel accepted the bottle from him. “We should check our weapons and everything before it gets too dark,” he recommended. 

“Relax, Sammy,” his brother urged. “Let me get this. You’re the one taking off tomorrow, let me take care of you a bit.” Sam wanted to object – he wasn’t in the habit of letting other people do his packing for him. At the same time he could see the worry in his big brother’s eyes. He couldn’t come with him, couldn’t help him. Couldn’t keep him from getting distracted or screwing up. At least this way he could make sure Sam didn’t screw up his preparation. 

If there had been any doubt in his mind Gilliel’s hand lightly pressing into his shoulder banished them. The angel passed the bottle to Artemis. Sam couldn’t remember a more upbeat “last night on earth” party. Did the others – the centaurs and the maenads and the nymph – really not know? Heaven, even a heaven denuded of angels, sucked. It was designed to suck. It was designed to mess with your mind. Even Dean and Cas seemed to be relaxing into the celebration, and they knew. Gilliel’s moved from lightly pressing on one shoulder to lightly rubbing his back. “You should try to relax, Sam,” she murmured in his ear. “Your tension won’t make you sleep any better, or make you any more alert tomorrow.”

“Keep rubbing my back like that and you’re going to create a completely different kind of tension,” he warned her, although truth be told he didn’t want her to stop at all. And how weird was that? “Your brother’s armed, you know that, right?” 

She laughed. And she didn’t stop. 

The low-key celebration continued through dinner – a delicious venison stew – and well past sunset. Dean and Cas were the first to retire. Maenads and centaurs drifted off in little clumps as the night continued. Eventually Sam felt he should retire to his own tent. Gilliel followed. He turned to her. “Can I ask you something, Gilliel?”

She tilted her head to the side. “Of course.” 

“Are you the reason I haven’t had nightmares the past few nights?” 

She considered. “I haven’t done anything consciously. But we have been in very close proximity while you have slept and I care strongly for you, so it’s possible that I have affected your dreams without meaning to. Are you upset?”

He smiled. “No. I just wanted to know.”

“May I stay with you tonight, Sam?”

He shrugged. “It’s not exactly a king-sized bed in a decent hotel, but if you don’t mind a sleeping bag on the ground it’s yours.”

“I don’t sleep, but it’s… comforting… to be near you,” she admitted.

Of course, this was different from a king-sized bed. This was extremely close proximity. He could manage this without embarrassing himself, right? More embarrassing than having his cheeks turn scarlet, anyway. “It’s… not something I was letting myself think about before,” he told her. “But I’ve obviously been very comfortable with it for the past few nights, right? I’ve looked forward to sleeping in ways I haven’t in years, maybe never.” He shrugged out of his outer shirts and re-arranged the bedroll. 

She lay down. He lay beside her and let her arrange herself in the crook of his arm as she liked – as they liked, he admitted. The sleeping bag would have been warmer but between the two of them there was enough warmth to keep things very comfortable. This was something Dean would never understand, he thought to himself. His brother couldn’t conceive of two people being close like this without something happening. It wasn’t as though Gilliel was unattractive. And it wasn’t as though Sam weren’t capable – he’d been healed, better than new or whatever. This was just… enough. It was more of what he needed right now. Maybe he was different, farther from human than he’d been in a very long time. The fact that a being like Gilliel – strong and warm and wonderful – could tolerate his touch made him feel almost clean, something he couldn’t remember ever having felt.

Morning arrived earlier than he would have liked. Still, waking up in someone’s arms was a pleasant sensation and one he’d more or less resigned himself to not feeling again. He was okay with waking up with the sun if it felt like this. Gilliel kissed his forehead as his eyes opened. “Good morning, Sam,” she greeted with a smile. “How do you feel?” 

He sat up. The air outside the blankets was not nearly as pleasant as it was under the blankets. Lucifer had burned cold. He was not going to think about that now. “I feel pretty good,” he admitted. “Better than I have in a long time.”

“Excellent.” She rose.

He stretched. “Should we start the ritual?”

“There should be breakfast first,” she told him. “Relax, Sam. Since there is no specific time that the ritual must start, I think we can afford to indulge a little.”

He couldn’t fault her logic. More to the point, he really didn’t want to. He probably should want to, but he didn’t. “Just a little?”

Later he realized that he needn’t have worried about delaying anything. Dean and Daphne were awake and in camp. Artemis was hunting. The rest of them were still asleep. Sam accepted the tin cup of coffee that was presented to him. “How is coffee this good possible in the back woods?” he wondered out loud.

“I know, right?” Dean seconded. “We never had coffee this good when we were camping with Dad.”

“We never had coffee this good when we were home with Dad,” Sam retorted.

“Just because we’re out in the woods doesn’t mean we have to live like barbarians,” Daphne told them with some dignity. “You’ve been to the winery, Sam. Can you imagine anyone connected with that place taking food anything but seriously?” 

“No,” he admitted as Larry and Melania emerged from a tent. “No, I really can’t.”

“Next time you come back you’ll have to go on a hike,” Larry urged. “Maybe join us on a hunt.” 

Sam laughed. “Like I can keep up with you on my lousy two legs!”

“You’ve been holding your own in training, Gigantor!” the mythical creature scoffed. 

“Nah, you’ve been going easy on me,” he shook his head.

“We’ll figure something out.” Melania stretched and rustled through the supplies until she found a griddle and some bacon. “Hey Sam, you want to find some bread? We’ll toast the bread in the bacon grease.”

“Sounds good.” He got up and looked for the bread. Slowly the rest of the team began to emerge. Breakfast was made. Breakfast was consumed. Breakfast was cleaned up after and things were put away. No one was rushed. It seemed almost as though they were just a group of friends on a normal, mundane camping trip. Sam himself felt incredibly calm – peaceful, really. It was a completely alien feeling to him. He’d caught a fleeting glimpse of this kind of feeling just before jumping into the Cage, but that had only lasted a few seconds. Now this alien sensation was building up in him and he knew he should be scared by it. Dean was scared, he could see it in his brother’s eyes. Cas was scared. No one else was.

Artemis grabbed a broom and swept a large area of forest floor clear. Gilliel grabbed a stick and drew the necessary sigil on the ground while the assault team grabbed their gear. How many commando teams, Sam wondered, included chalk? Cas grabbed the silver bowl and Dean cut the arm of each team member, collecting the blood in the bowl. This had been Gilliel’s idea, letting people not part of the actual team participate in the ritual. Sam was perfectly capable of drawing the sigil, of cutting and collecting the blood himself, but it made the others feel like they were useful for more than sitting and waiting in the woods. More to the point it made Cas feel like he was able to do something to clean up his own mess, which might go some way to improve his attitude toward people who were not Dean. If it didn’t affect the ritual Sam was all for it. Some of Gilliel’s blood was necessary as well, so that was collected. They’d brought the lamb’s blood with them, of course. Castiel had insisted on being the human whose blood was used, so he was cut as well. 

The next part was all Sam. He took the bowl from Dean and swirled it gently to combine the different bloods (and, er, ichor in his case) with the necessary herbs. He then dipped a finger into the bowl and painted the same complex sigil from the ground onto Bob’s forehead, murmuring a long stream of ritual Enochian as he did so. He might have gotten away with Latin – many rituals worked in Latin, after all, and he still did a lot of dreaming in Latin. At the same time, Enochian was the language of the place they were trying to reach and he was frankly far more fluent in that language than in any other, to include English. He figured it was better to be safe than sorry. When he finished with Bob he moved on to Daphne, and then to Larry, and so on until every member of the team was marked. He marked himself last and it had not been easy to teach himself to paint on his own forehead without looking into a mirror. He knew when he’d gotten it right, though. He could actually see the energy connecting the eight of them if he allowed it. Now the eight stepped into the circle, took positions at the eight points of the sigil. Had the ritual been designed with eight participants in mind? That seemed a little too coincidental, and there was enough room that more people could have gone. Hell, he could have fit whatever the half-elephant equivalent of a centaur was in the circle had it been necessary. 

He focused on the incantation. The words came to mind almost unbidden, welling up from deep within his chest. The sigil on the ground began to glow with a pure white light, as did the sigils on the foreheads of the participants. Dean and Cas were forced to shut their eyes, but Gilliel and Artemis seemed to be fine. Sam continued the incantation, the syllables rolling off his tongue with ease. The wind picked up. Dirt stirred and leaves danced but the sigil stayed firmly in place. The entire incantation took a good five minutes, five minutes during which no one moved. At the end of those five minutes, Sam threw the remaining blood from the bowl into the center of the circle. There hadn’t been much blood but it seemed to pour from the bowl like punch at a junior high school dance, igniting as it hit the ground. White light exploded around them –

\- and then they were elsewhere. Sam, of course, recognized where they were immediately. Two-lane blacktop under a sea of stars, with deep woods to the left and a swamp filled with tall grasses to the right. The others looked around with wonder. “Is this…” Cynthia asked in a low whisper. 

“Heaven, yeah,” Sam identified. The maenads had started out as human once, he remembered. They’d probably once dreamed of coming here at their death. “This is the Axis Mundi.” He looked around for something familiar. “There we go.” 

“Yeah, uh, Sam, that’s an outhouse,” Steve pointed out gently. “Not really designed for centaurs.”

He grinned at his friend. “And who in heaven really needs to use an outhouse, Steve? Souls don’t have bodily functions and angels are multidimensional wavelengths of celestial intent. Come on, before we attract more attention than we really need to.” He led the way up the road toward the small structure and grabbed a piece of chalk from his bag. It only took a minute for him to sketch out the equation he needed. He opened the door. “Go, quickly. It’s the safest place in Heaven.” 

The others looked at him but obeyed. When Larry made it through, disappearing into a space that shouldn’t have been able to fit more than two-thirds of him, the others relaxed and followed. Sam went last. He’d been a little worried about remembering the equation – the last time he’d been in Heaven he’d been pretty sure it was all a trick, and even then he’d known he wasn’t making the return trip when all was said and done. The Trials had managed to clarify all of his memories beautifully though and that had to have some benefits.

Fortunately he got there just in time. Ash stopped just short of going after Xenovia, who had a dagger at the ready. “Whoa, Ash, chill, they’re with me, okay?”

Ash stopped. So did Xenovia. So did Ellen, and Bobby. “Sam?” they asked.


	14. Chapter 14

Oh. He hadn’t planned for this. He’d planned for all of the monsters Metatron could possibly dredge up but not for this, this lump in his heart. Ash of course he’d expected. He’d counted on seeing Ash here. Ellen, though – to see Ellen here, in the Roadhouse where she belonged even though it had burned before his first death at Cold Oak was like being stabbed in the heart, and he should know. And Bobby, who was more of a father than John Winchester had ever been – this was going to be a lot harder than he’d expected. “Hi, guys,” he said, looking down. He summoned the memory of Gilliel’s face, of her hand on his back. “It’s good to see you all.”

“Wish I could say the same for you, Sam,” Bobby chided. “I thought I told you ‘not too soon’ the last time we saw each other, boy.” He caught him up in a huge hug. Sam tried not to flinch. “You don’t feel… you feel different than most folks I see up here, Sam.”

“Most folks you see up here are dead, Bobby,” he replied with a little smile. 

The souls looked at each other. “Come again?” Ellen said bluntly. 

“We’re not dead. We’re alive.”

“Living humans can’t enter Heaven, dude,” Ash reminded him, grabbing beers from the case.

“Nothing gets by him, does it?” Bob asked Sam, accepting his beverage.

“Ash, Ellen, Bobby, I’d like to introduce some friends of mine. These are Larry, Bob and Steve. They’re centaurs. This is Daphne. She’s a wood nymph. And these are Xenovia, Melania and Cynthia. They’re maenads. Guys, these are Ellen, Bobby and Ash. They’re family.”

Bobby scowled. “You led an invasion force of mo-“ 

“Non-humans,” Sam filled in as Ellen stomped on Bobby’s foot.

“Non-humans into Heaven? And how’d you get here? Last time I saw you you were mostly human, kid.”

“Mostly human wasn’t cutting it anymore, I guess,” he said without a sigh. Without an audible sigh, anyway. “Uh, listen. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong up here. The angels have been booted from heaven, all except for one.”

“Not Cas,” Ellen cringed.

“No, not Cas. Cas isn’t the one who’s still here, anyway. Cas is human. It’s his grace that was stolen to complete the spell,” Daphne explained, interposing herself subtly between Cynthia and Ash. “Sam was the only person who was going to be able to navigate Heaven, and the only one the Olympians were willing to make an offer to.” She grinned, maybe a little wolfishly. Who knew wood nymphs could be protective? “I don’t think we’d have been quite so willing to work with any of the other candidates anyway.” 

Ash snorted. “Like Dean-o could have figured out how to navigate Heaven. I gave Sam here a tutorial back in the day; Dean was more interested in drinking beers with Pam. So… no more angels, then?”

“They’re stuck on Earth. They still exist and they still have their mojo and whatnot, but they’re there. There is exactly one angel in Heaven and he’s not exactly one of the good guys.” Sam sighed. “Which means…”

“Which means that there is nothing guarding the souls up here in Heaven,” Bobby finished. “Damn it. I don’t suppose you idjits got the gates of Hell closed?” 

Sam kept his eyes on his beer bottle. “No.” Two pairs of hands found their ways to his shoulders – one belonging to Bob, another to Melania. “Almost, but Dean stopped me.”

“What the hell for?”

“He would have died,” Cynthia frowned.

“Because it would have been the first time,” the old hunter commented. Ellen smacked him on the back of his head while Ash took his beer away. 

“Hey, listen, I was all on board,” Sam agreed. “Dean wasn’t when he figured it out.”

“When Dean found out about Metatron’s perfidy,” Xenovia added, scowling, “he intervened to stop Sam in case Metatron lied when inscribing the demon tablet as well. They couldn’t be sure that there weren’t hidden consequences or agendas there as well. After all, if closing the gates of Heaven put all of the angels onto Earth, what might closing the gates of Hell have done?” 

Sam hadn’t thought of that. He really wished no one else had either. “Anyway,” he interrupted, feeling more than a little like a bomb squad robot, “we’re trying to reverse Metatron’s spell. We came here because it was the first place I thought of to get our bearings when we got here, and because I thought if anyone was likely to be able to get a lead on where Metatron might be it would be you, Ash.” 

The mulleted man preened. “Well you aren’t wrong, amigo, but there’s probably an easier way.”

“What do you mean?” Larry asked. Steve picked up the darts.

“Well, I mean, you’re not really supposed to be here, right?”

“The Garden,” Sam surmised. “This place is protected. The Garden isn’t, not really. Metatron should realize that there’s an intrusion and he should come to us. Less hunting, more fighting.” He glanced at his companions.

“Let me get this straight. You want to go fight the one angel left in Heaven?” Ellen frowned, putting a hand on Sam’s arm. “Sweetie, isn’t that a little dangerous? For you, I mean, not just all the souls in Heaven?”

“I’m not worried about us, Ellen,” he told her gently. According to his father’s journal he’d actually stayed with her a few times when he’d been small. He didn’t remember it, but she’d always been gentle with him. Maybe more so with him than with Dean. “We knew the risks, and we’re prepared.”

“The souls up here are another story, though,” Bobby pointed out. “They’ll be a tremendous source of power for anyone who can get their mitts on them. Hell, rogue angels…” He glanced at Sam. “Olympians.”

Right. Of course. “They can’t get in here, Bobby,” he explained quickly. “Otherwise they’d be here already.” He grinned at Ash. “I wish you could’ve met Dionysus, man. You’d love him. We’ll figure something out. The goal is to reverse the spell, anyway. Let the angels go back upstairs. Right now their fighting is affecting the human world and no one wants that. The last time that happened we called it the Apocalypse, remember?” He grimaced. “I’m not exactly in a hurry to repeat that process, you know? They can do all their fighting upstairs if they want.” He refused to contemplate the outcome for him personally. Gilliel’s choices were hers. “All right. We’ll cover our tracks to keep you guys safe. Hopefully we’ll be able to stop in and say goodbye before we leave again.” He exchanged a handshake with Bobby and hugs with Ellen and Ash – they remembered him from a time when he was a lot more tactile, after all. They didn’t necessarily get that wasn’t him anymore and it was okay, he was expecting it. Then he drew a different equation on the door, opened it – 

And the octet emerged into a church rectory. “What the hell, Sam?” Steve wanted to know. 

“Everyone’s perception of Heaven is different,” he explained, leading them through Pastor Jim’s house. “Heaven is mostly your happiest memories. This one is from when I was about eight or so. My dad took Dean on a hunt with him and left me with his friend Pastor Jim for like three weeks over the summer. It was awesome.” The centaurs found it difficult to navigate through the cramped space but nothing they knocked into fell over. It wasn’t real, after all. “I had to keep up some of my training, but I got to spend a lot of time just reading and studying. Dad didn’t know that I knew, you know? But Pastor Jim did, and he let me research as much as I wanted.” He smiled fondly. “Anyway, no time to linger.” They got to the back door of the rectory and he drew another equation. 

When he opened the door the next memory was a dingy motel in Pontiac, Michigan. Bobby’s image was there in the hallway, and Ruby was there pressed against the wall. The happy part of the memory was in his arms – Dean, fresh from the Pit. The brothers held each other as tight as they physically could, and the relief that surged through the abomination threatened to send him (and his brother) collapsing to the floor. He couldn’t help but wallow in that memory for just a few seconds – pure joy, before the world had gone to shit – before turning away and continuing. The door to the bathroom became their exit to another of Sam’s memories.

“What the hell is this?” Cynthia demanded. “And who are these people?” 

“It’s my twentieth birthday,” he explained in a whisper. “You wouldn’t know any of these people.” He looked around. Rebecca and Zach, before their lives were ruined by a shapeshifter and his clumsy attempts to fix it. Jess, before she burned on the ceiling in Azazel’s bizarre preferred mechanism of death. Brady, before Sam knew he was tainted. Marcus and Patrick and Liz and Lila. And a freaking ice cream cake, with a candle on it. “We’re cutting through my memories because I’m the one who knows the equations. I think we’ve made enough turns that we can go where we need to.” He raced through the scene, unwilling to even really look. The next time someone celebrated his birthday had been Amelia, in Kermit. At the door he kept his eyes strictly on his writing surface as he scrawled the equation. If his hand was shaking no one said anything.

And here they were. The Cleveland Botanical Gardens, just as Sam remembered it. The others looked around themselves. “Dude,” Larry frowned. “Your idea of Paradise is Cleveland?” 

“Long story,” he said, readying Mjolnir.

“Good,” a familiar if irritating voice said. There was no tell-tale flapping of wings, no “pop” sound to alert them to their enemy’s arrival. It wasn’t necessary on this plane. There was simply a Metatron one second where there had been none the moment before. “Sam, it’s good to see you. Thanks for taking the time to come visit… although, you don’t look quite right for this place. I’m surprised. I’d expected to see you here a lot sooner.”

“I’m just full of little disappointments,” he replied. He wanted to take the bastard out now, now now now. Wait – was it him or the hammer? Gods’ weapons could be tricky that way sometimes. If he could hold the power to shut down an entire plane of existence in his frame he could keep control over his temper long enough to figure out where Cas’ grace was being stored.

“On the contrary, Sam. You’re full of surprises, but you’ve never disappointed anyone. Well, maybe your dad, but let’s not worry too much about him. I mean, he’s not exactly up here now, is he? And Dean, but he’s really been John Winchester Redux lately, hasn’t he?” He gestured and the others found themselves frozen. 

Sam alone had freedom of action. “What did you do to them?” Sam seethed, stepping toward the unappealing angel.

“Nothing permanent, don’t worry.” He shrugged. “It’s really pretty impressive. I mean, who would have thought of bringing monsters up to heaven? Pretty ingenious, I have to hand it to you. The perfect solution.” 

He shrugged. “I can’t exactly take credit. They volunteered. You need to flip the switch, Metatron.” 

The angel’s face scrunched up. “Why would I do something like that? Sam, come with me.” He grabbed the hunter’s hand and just like that, the scene changed. Sam was alone with the angel in a giant library. “Do you hear that, Sam?” He paused. “That’s right. You don’t. It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. Heaven is quiet. There is no bustling. There is no fighting. There are no officious bureaucrats pushing their weight around, jockeying for position. It’s just as it should be – calm and quiet and perfect.”

Sam cast his eyes around. The walls were lined with books, as far as the eyes could see. There were a few tables in the middle of the room, just as he’d expect in a public library or study space. A large mahogany desk dominated the scene. “Somehow this doesn’t surprise me, Metatron. Let me guess, this is where you spend your days.” The villain grabbed a book from a shelf, seemingly at random. “Here you go, Sam. You might find it interesting.” 

He ran his fingers along the cover. It felt like leather, embossed leather. Reality was anyone’s guess of course. This was Heaven. “The City of God?” he read aloud. “I’ve already read it, thanks.”

“Ah, but which edition? That’s the thing about Heaven, Sam. About stories. By the time that a story makes its way to you it’s gone through a thousand edits and rewrites and shifts and changes. You wouldn’t recognize the original version of ninety percent of what you’ve read. Every writer makes choices, Sam. What information to leave in. What information to leave out. What’s pertinent to the story. And this, Sam, is the original draft. Keep it. A token of my esteem.”

Once again he found himself forced to summon the memory of Gilliel to the front of his mind. This time he called to mind her smiles, the sound of her voice. There was no way to restrain his temper at the thought of the “esteem” of an angel otherwise. “Uh-huh. And did you not think that leaving the souls in Heaven unprotected was pertinent to the story?” 

The enemy sat down at the desk and put his feet up, leaning back. His hand brushed against the drawers on the right side. “The angels don’t have to leave Heaven unprotected, Sam. If they choose to do so then that’s up to them. They can fight demons from the ground. I mean they have free will, right? And who do we have to blame for that?” He smirked.

“You really think all this is Cas’ fault?”

“No, Sam. You think he’s the first angel to develop free will?” He put his feet down and leaned forward again. “Sam, have you done much demonology research? I mean, really researched?”

He could stay calm. He could stay calm. “Is this a trick question?”

“No, it’s legitimate. Otherwise you’d know. Why do you think you saw through Zachariah’s false Heaven so easily, Sam? Why do you think it took you all of two beers’ worth of time to grasp how your little friend Ash hacked Heaven?” He waved a hand. “Yes, I know all about that. He told me. I’ve been collecting stories, you know.” 

“Of course you have.” He shrugged. “Because I passed differential equations? And because I never trusted Zachariah?”

“No, Sam. There are plenty of people up here who never figured out what was going on. There is just enough angel blood in you that you don’t really fall for all of our tricks. You’re not as gullible, I guess.”

“No, no. Demon blood, Metatron. I’m the abomination, remember? The kid with the demon blood. Boy King or whatever they were calling me back in the day.” What was it with this guy and the sound of his own voice? Cas must have done whatever this jerk wanted just to get him to shut up.

Metatron chuckled. “True. But before you developed your drinking habit – and I don’t mean the whiskey you gulped down while your brother was in Hell – it was one specific demon’s blood in your veins. Winding its way through your organs. Embedding itself in your marrow, in your bones. Remember?”

He remembered. “Not specifically, but sure.” 

“Azazel.”

“I’m aware.”

“Come on, Sam. Work with me here. I’m trying to fill in some of the blanks on your story – I’d think this would be the kind of thing that would excite you.” 

“My story shouldn’t excite you, Metatron. It should make you very nervous.” He shook his head.

“Ah, but it’s fascinating. You see, most demons, even the most powerful, started out as humans. Lilith – she was the first human woman. I always thought she got a bum deal. You’d have liked her before she went demon, Sam. She was having no part of that whole subservience business. Of course, was that the whole story? You only have transcribed words to go by. At first sure there was a prophet, and then maybe the guy who copied the words down from him was honest. But the next guy, was he honest too? Or the next? Or did they have their own agendas?” He grinned and looked around. “The answer is probably in here somewhere. “Anyway, the whole point is that not all demons started out as humans. By some accounts a good third of the Host rebelled with Lucifer, you know.”

“You’re suggesting that Azazel started out as an angel.” He knew his tone was flat.

“If you can prove that he didn’t I’d love to hear it. Of course, you can’t. It’s in the name, isn’t it? It’s in the things he could do – well outside the realm of the things a normal demon could do. It’s in how damn hard he was to kill. And then there’s one other thing, isn’t there? I remember him. You could try talking to your handsome friend Castiel about him too, if Naomi’s tinkering didn’t screw him up too badly.” He grimaced. “I’m not sure whose bright idea that was.” 

“Is that a pun?”

“It’s a pun.” His foe chuckled. “I knew you had a sense of humor, Sam. Somewhere under all that angst and fever.” 

“Puns aren’t humorous.”

“Have you met Gabriel?” 

“I watched him die, remember?”

“Oh, right.” He shook his head. “Now there was someone you would really have gotten along with.”

“We didn’t. He had a hard time getting past that whole demon thing. And I had a hard time getting past that whole killing dean a hundred and eighty seven times thing.”

“But you’re not counting.” The other man raised an eyebrow. “You might have a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder there, Sam. Have you considered talking to someone about it?”

“Metatron, that is so far down the list of my issues it doesn’t even register. It’s somewhere between ‘needs to eat more’ and ‘daddy issues.’ Look. You’re one angel. Once the demons sort themselves out they aren’t going to hold off on accessing the power of all the souls up here. It’s bad enough that the civil wars up here thinned the ranks so badly –“

“Don’t forget the Apocalypse, Sam. The one you helped to start.”

“No, no. I started that one. Don’t let me off the hook here, Metatron.” He let himself smile. The guy was either trying to get him to let down his guard by making him think him sympathetic or get him to fly off the handle and lose sight of the goal. Either way Sam wasn’t going to let him win, even if the stupid hammer was itching to shock the stupid angel into oblivion. “It doesn’t do much good to defend Heaven from the ground if there isn’t a way to know when the demons are moving or whatever. The angels need to be up here, at least enough of them to defend against Hell. You know it. I mean, if one cambion thing like me can waltz in what about a host of demons?” He kept his eyes on his enemy’s, forcing his body to stay relaxed. 

He shrugged. “Not my problem. They should have thought of that before they came after me.”

“The ones who came after you are gone now. Gabriel and Raphael are dead, Metatron. There was only one way that the Cage was getting popped and I’m pretty sure it can’t happen anymore. And it wasn’t getting opened then. You’re safe from them. You can go back to hiding in caves or libraries or whatever and they’ll never find you. Hell, they probably don’t even know it was you. They probably think it was all Castiel, right?” He wondered what was going through his friends’ minds back in the Garden. What were they seeing now that he wasn’t there, his memories controlling their perception?

“If they don’t know it was me, if they don’t regret running me out of my home then what was the point of this whole stupid exercise?” And there was the petulance, the anger. Everything Sam had expected to see from the villain – or at least the personality traits. “Heaven is mine now, Sam. The angels can rot on Earth. You and your friends are welcome to stay. All the knowledge you might ever want is in this room, Sam. But I’m not flipping the switch.”

He considered. “All of the knowledge?”

Metatron smiled. “You’re not like your brother. You’re a scholar, Sam. I knew from the moment I met you that you’d have a hard time resisting the lure of the stacks. Like me.” He gestured. “Indulge yourself. It’s not as though anything else can get through. You’re safe, you’re secure.” Safety and security – the two things he’d always wanted. Except he hadn’t just wanted them for him. He’d wanted them for Dean, and Dean was stuck in Maine with a former angel undergoing the Terrible Twos and puberty just in time to feel the stirrings of early middle age. He’d wanted that for Jess and she’d burned on the ceiling. He’d wanted that for Madison and she’d gotten a bullet in her heart. He’d wanted that for Bobby and he’d become a vengeful spirit. He’d wanted that for Kevin. He’d wanted that for Prometheus.

He wanted that for Dean and for Kevin, still. He wanted that for Crowley and even for Cas. He wanted it for his centaur friends, for his maenad friends, for the nymphs and satyrs and his other friends at the winery. He wanted that for Kali and Saraswati. He wanted that for Dionysus and for Ariadne and for Apollo. He wanted that for Artemis and he really, really wanted that for Gilliel. “All of the knowledge I could possibly want.”

“Sure thing. You can probably even read most of it, by now.” Metatron gave a slick, slimy grin. 

Sam nodded. He rose to his feet and in one smooth motion brought Mjolnir on line. The energy flowed right through him, arcing through the air and filling the room with the scent of ozone. He had the sense to close his eyes. When he opened them, Metatron’s body lay on the floor, surrounded by the charred outline of wings.


	15. Chapter 15

Could it really have been that easy? Metatron hadn’t even fought back. He hadn’t lifted a finger in his own defense. He’d just… died. Like he hadn’t expected Sam to actually fight him. Had he not understood that some weapons actually worked on angels? Did he not recognize Mjolnir? Or did he seriously see some kind of insane kinship between the hunter and himself? 

Whatever. Sam had work to do. He didn’t have time to contemplate the “why” of his apparent victory. First he had to find Cas’ grace. Metatron had not been subtle about the desk. He’d been so obvious that Sam worried it was a ruse. Seriously, it wasn’t like the guy was stupid. At the same time Ruby’s voice came back to him (unbidden, but present nonetheless.) “Angels aren’t usually worried about hiding their dirty business,” she’d pointed out all those years ago when she’d helped him to find Dean.

It was a place to start, anyway. The drawers on the right-hand side of the desk weren’t locked. Why would they be? Who exactly was Metatron hiding things from? Who did he really think was going to be able to come and take things? It seemed as though he hadn’t been completely surprised – he’d been suave, but he’d frozen Sam’s friends easily. He’d made no move to restrain the hunter, though. Instead he’d actually expected Sam to be reasoned with. To side with him. To understand him. Or at least to get so distracted by the freaking library that he’d just stop. And there it was – well, someone’s grace anyway. He’d seen captive grace before, and this was it. Who else’s it might belong to he didn’t know. He grabbed it and put it into his shirt pocket, buttoning it just to be sure. 

Metatron had told him that all of the knowledge he needed was in this room somewhere. If that were true he would be able to find some way of getting the angels back to heaven while he was up here. On the one hand Metatron’s word certainly didn’t count for much with Sam these days. He was just one man, on the other hand. He might have a few small advantages but there were an awful lot of books here. He needed help. Fortunately for him the best researcher he’d ever known was available. He might not be terribly approving of him or his recent life choices, but he’d probably be okay with helping to open Heaven back to its angels.

He grabbed his chalk and drew the equation to take him back to the Garden, which shimmered for a moment before re-setting to the familiar Cleveland Botanical Gardens. His friends had been milling around aimlessly but relaxed when they saw him. “Sam!” Daphne exclaimed, rushing forward. “You’re all right!” 

That was a phrase that pretty much no one had ever used to describe him in the history of time. “Yeah. Yeah, uh, Metatron wasn’t really a fighter if he could avoid it. I think he thought that would shake out differently.”

“So he’s dead?” Bob queried.

“As a doornail,” he confirmed. “Listen, if we’re going to figure out how to reverse the spell we need to get back to the library and do some research. My friend Bobby, he’s the best researcher I’ve ever known.”

“The guy with the hat?” Xenovia confirmed, pushing her dark hair out of her face. “Do you really think he’ll be willing to help? He wasn’t so thrilled about the bunch of us being here.”

Sam shrugged. “He’s basically my father. The closest thing I really had to one besides Dean, anyway. He’s also a hunter. He’s pretty hung up on the whole ‘human’ thing. But I can’t imagine that he’d be thrilled about leaving Heaven open to the demons and whoever else can make it in here, you know? Let’s see if we can convince him.” 

They shrugged and followed him back to the Roadhouse, where the triumvirate waited with beer and whiskey. “You made it!” Ash crowed as Ellen put the whiskey away. Sam repressed a smirk. It was a funny kind of Heaven when you prepared for a wake.

“Uh, yeah,” he said as his friends gathered around him. “The worst angel this side of the Earth’s crust is gone, but now comes the hard part. We need to figure out how to reverse the spell and let the angels back into Heaven.”

“You couldn’t have thought of that before you iced him?” Bobby groused, passing him a beer. “Idjit.”

“He gave me a subtle hint, Bobby. He showed me the room where the text is hidden. I figure if we go in there together and look we can probably find it pretty quickly. What do you say?” He held his breath.

The old man – soul – and Ash exchanged looks. “Do you think you can get us back there?” the latter asked. 

“Hell yeah.” Relief threatened to weaken the living man’s knees but he managed to make it back to the door without falling over. “Let’s go!” 

“Holy crap,” Bobby breathed when he saw the library. Ash just gaped. “And you think we’re going to be able to figure out how to find the spell?”

“Well… yeah. Probably.” He sighed and took out his phone. No service – too much to hope for, he supposed. The damn thing had worked in Hell – of course it had. Hell had its own network and everything. 

“Got any clues about what we’re looking for here, Ace?” Ash asked.

“Well, since the original spell was written down on a tablet it makes sense that the counterspell might be written on a tablet too, right? So, I guess… tablets?”

Bobby shook his head. “I see you really thought this through.” He sighed. “All right. Let’s divide the room up into tenths and get started. Oh, and Sam? Don’t go getting distracted.”

His new friends looked miffed and even Ash looked a little annoyed, but Sam grinned. “Same goes for you, Bobby. It’s not like you can’t come back here.”

“You’ve got a point.” The older man gave a soft half-smile. He knew Sam well. “Let’s get going. Damn tablet ain’t gonna find itself.”

The thing about tablets, though, was that they weren’t written in English, or Greek, or Latin or Hebrew or even Enochian. They’d been written down in that language that only the prophets could read. Well, prophets and Metatron, who had written them. There were millions of volumes to get through, too. Just… millions. Even with ten people looking and not even really reading them they had hours and hours of work to get through. Then there was the distraction factor. For all the promises and warnings about not getting caught up in this bibliophile’s wet dream of a room it was impossible for his eye not to wander a little. It wasn’t as though he’d ever have this opportunity again, would it? He found a little pile growing – tablets, of course, and maybe a few bound books as well. Only a few – five or six, maybe. Not including Metatron’s parting gift. There was a demonology from the tenth century. A book of medical knowledge lost in the fall of the House of Wisdom when Baghdad fell to the Mongols. A papyrus scroll that had been burned at Alexandria. Little things like that, because of course books went to Heaven when they died.

It took an accident for Sam to really get it. He’d been moving to put a tablet in the pile and tripped over Metatron’s dead body. Usually he remembered to step over it but he’d been caught up in the insane squiggly writing on it and actually tripped. Metatron had not needed to look for “City of God.” It had just come to him. Sam had controlled his own path through Heaven – he’d drawn the equations himself, he’d guided the way. It wasn’t as though that made him particularly special – Ash had been the one to hack Heaven, to teach him how to do that. He’d just run with it. Ultimately what that meant was that he’d had some control over his environment. And honestly, why had Metatron made all those statements about Azazel’s distant past if they weren’t supposed to do some good? 

He wasn’t going to say anything to anyone. Why draw attention to what was probably going to be a failure anyway? If it was not a failure, why draw attention to something to make him more of a freak? No, he reminded himself firmly. It didn’t make him more of a freak. His new friends didn’t care. It would further divide him from his old family, from Bobby and Ash and Ellen, but the likelihood of seeing them again after leaving here was slim to none anyway. He sat down at the desk and closed his eyes. There was only one tablet that he needed. It was the one with the counter to Metatron’s spell. He focused on it. He hadn’t ever seen it before, and it was hard to focus on something that he’d never seen. Still, he could focus on an idea. There was no one better at focusing on an idea than Sam Winchester, be it revenge or escape or self-destruction. Now he just needed to focus on reversal – opening the gates, fixing the mistake. He let himself imagine the steps of the spell as he knew them and concentrated until he saw them happening in reverse.

A sound made him open his eyes. A tablet had moved. It was on the top shelf in Larry’s section, but it was the work of a moment to bring it to himself. The thing wasn’t even heavy. If he could bring multiple beers to multiple locations at the same time he could bring a damn tablet to himself. “Got it,” he said, wiping the blood away from his nose. 

Cynthia rushed over to him. “Are you okay, Sam?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Metatron pretty much told me how to find it, I just didn’t get it.” He shook his head. “Well, we’ve got what we came for. Thanks for your help, Bobby. Ash.”

“Hey, hey, now. Don’t you go rushing off. Let’s go back to the Roadhouse and have a couple of beers before you go rushing back to the living world,” Ash objected. “We’ve got something to celebrate, after all.” He grinned.

“What do you want to do with these other tablets, Sam?” Melania gestured to the pile. 

He bit his lip. On the one hand, he kind of wanted to leave them here. After all, too much knowledge in the wrong hands could be dangerous. And Kevin did not need the extra work, not one little bit. At the same time, were they really going to just take his word for it that this was the correct tablet? It wasn’t like he wasn’t capable of being wrong. Hell, it was what he was best at. “I guess we can always send them back up here if we don’t need them,” he said, loading the books he’d decided to loot into his bag. He could scan them in and send them back when the gates were open again. “Come on. There are beers with our names on them.”

Bob patted him on the back. “I like how you think.”

They filed out toward the door, where Ash guided them to the Roadhouse. Ellen pulled some pints for them. Sam had developed a taste for microbrews in college, and he’d had the chance to indulge when Dean had been in Purgatory. There was a time and a place for everything, though. Even in Heaven, Roadhouse beer was still crappy and that was just fine with Sam. He drank his weak domestic pilsner and liked it. “So you nice people got what you came for?” the lady asked.

“Yeah. Boy pulled it off the shelf with his mind,” Bobby groused, but he ruffled Sam’s hair affectionately. “I don’t see why he needed to pull us out of a nice warm bar for all that.” 

“Sometimes Sam’s a little slow on the uptake,” Ash joked, draining his beer in one go. Unlike the others he did not choose to drink from a glass but from a can, which he now crushed against his head. Sam missed Ash. “It was nice to be in there though. I wonder how I missed that place before.”

“I guess Metatron either hid it before he fled Heaven or just brought his book collection back when he came home,” he theorized as the maenads started up a game of pool. “Whatever, man. It’s yours now. You might want to do something about the body though. “

“You could mount the head on the wall,” Daphne suggested. “It would look great above the jukebox.”

Ellen laughed. “I like her.”

People relaxed a little, playing games and drinking beer. Sam found himself alone with Ellen and Bobby. “So,” Ellen sighed. “What exactly did they do to you this time, Sam?”

“Come again?” She swatted him with her bar rag. “Don’t you toy with me, boy. I’ve changed your diapers. Living humans can’t enter Heaven. You’re here. What did they do to you?”

He sighed. “I’m still partly human, Ellen. Just not mostly human. It was the only way to get the job done.”

“So… what are you now?” Bobby wanted to know. “Are you going to sprout another set of legs and have to sleep in the barn or what?”

“No,” he laughed. “I’m still me. I can’t be used as an angelic vessel, which is a huge plus. And my soul is still human, or so they tell me. But neither Heaven nor Hell can really bother me anymore. I’m outside that now, and that’s okay. It’s better this way. I know you don’t like it, but I was always, you know…” 

“Sam,” Ellen told him, taking his hand, “if you’re away from those sons of bitches it can only be a good thing. I saw how unhappy you were by the time I died. Bobby told me what happened to you by the time he died, by the time he got here I mean. And it is almost all because of them. I say screw ‘em. Good for you.” 

“Son, I’ll admit I was a little weirded out, but I told you before I ain’t cutting you out. You’re my boy, Sam.” Bobby’s arms encircled him again, and once he fought the panic down he had to admit that felt pretty good.

They couldn’t stay here forever, or even for very long. Time passed in Heaven just as it did on Earth, and the sooner they could get the tablet to Kevin the sooner they could get the angels back where they belonged. (If where some had belonged had become debatable that was something they could discuss later.) 

They performed the ritual to return to Maine, re-appearing in the clearing just as the sun was setting. Apparently they weren’t expected back quite yet because even before the party could move Artemis had a bow on them and Dean’s gun was aimed at Sam’s face. Both hunters relaxed as Sam held his hands up. “Whoa,” he said. “It’s us. It’s us.” His brother moved to hug him but Sam held up a hand. “Careful,” he warned, pulling the vial out of his shirt pocket. “You don’t want to break this.”

Dean’s jaw dropped. “Is that…”

Cas appeared out of the woods just as Gilliel emerged from their tent. “My grace,” the former angel whispered, approaching slowly. His hand shook as he reached for it. “I… thank you, Sam.”

“No problem, Cas.” He shifted. Cas’ eyes were really intense, and tears just magnified their effect. 

Their companion turned to the elder Winchester. “Dean… I want you to hold this.”

“Me?” Dean paled. Gilliel’s eyes widened and she bit her lip, but silently took Sam’s hand as the scene played out. “Uh, Cas, don’t you, uh, want it and stuff?”

“We may need it for the reversal spell. And I know you are concerned that I have seemed to have abandoned you in the past. I want you to know that no matter what happens part of me is always with you.” 

Another hand slipped into his, the callused hand of the goddess. Sam gave it a squeeze as his brother gasped. “Cas, I… okay. If you… uh… sure. Um…. Screw it.” He kissed the former angel, bringing joyful tears to most of the applauding audience. Both men blushed, and then Dean grinned and ran his hand through his hair. “Er… yeah…”

“Put it someplace safe,” Sam prompted as the rest of the team relaxed and settled in around the fire. “We can head home tomorrow.”

“So soon?” Gilliel asked. She sounded a little disappointed.

“We have a new tablet for Kevin.” He reached into his bag to show what was inside. “I’m pretty sure that it’s got what we need to re-open the gates, but we won’t know for sure until someone can read it. And it’s not going to translate itself, you know?”

Cas nodded. “I’ll call Charlie,” he offered, arm around Dean’s waist. He frowned. “What are all of those other books?”

“You looted Heaven?” Dean blinked. 

The younger hunter blushed a little. “Because I’m the first. Besides, I’m sure Metatron just stole most of these from other places to begin with, and it isn’t like he’ll be using them again.”

Artemis guided him to a chair. The former angel cleared his throat. “Sam has a valid point, Dean.” He offered a tentative smile. “So… Metatron is dead?”

“Extremely,” Larry told him, grabbing beers and distributing them. “I saw the body myself. We all did.”

Gilliel sighed. “It seems sadder, somehow, to have an angel dead in Heaven. Not sad enough to wish you hadn’t done it,” she added with a quick kiss to Sam’s cheek. “Thank you, Sam. I’m proud of you.”

He smiled at his angel and his goddess as Cas called Charlie and Dean went to put Cas’ grace somewhere safe. “Thanks.” 

“So what next?” Artemis wanted to know. 

“Well, the prophet translates the tablet. We figure out how much of it we believe, because Metatron wrote it down and he was a lying sack of –“ he bit back on the term. “Celestial intent,” he finished lamely. “So we figure out the spell reversal, and then we do what we need to as fast as we can. We don’t need to be leaving Heaven closed up, you know?”

“And after that?” Gilliel whispered. “After that?” He took one of her hands. Artemis took the other. No one was really paying the trio much attention. “Gilliel, there’s only one person who can make that decision for you and that’s you. I told you before, though. I will back your play, whatever it is. If you want to stay on Earth with us then I’ll back you. I’m on your side, whatever your side is.”

“So am I, Gilliel,” Artemis reminded her. “Whatever happens you are not alone.” The angel smiled then, and both the goddess and the abomination caught her up in an embrace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, this is the final chapter. If you want more from this setting you probably already know that it will have to be in an AU, but feel free to send me prompts for one-shots and I'll be happy to get around to them.


End file.
